Last week, Ukraine’s President Zelensky gave the world a lesson in masterful communications. As he navigates the unimaginable destruction of his country and demonstrates strength as a leader, he has also shown how to engage your audience. While the horrors…
A plan for the sake of a plan
When you are stuck in the business of day to day, it’s easy to get lazy with your communication planning. Just list one thing for every channel, every audience you can think of, and the standard list of risks –…
We want to do it all
Strategy, advice, content development, creative, campaigns, training, relationship building. We want to do it all. Communications professionals are often high achieving, high energy, perfectionists. We have to be, it’s part of the role. It means that we want to deliver…
Reporting, our necessary evil.
In my experience, comms people are generally bad at two things – measuring what they do and telling people how great they are. It’s not on purpose. We always have the best of intentions. You might even do it every…
Have you started your EA communications strategy?
Updated for 2021! AGGGGHHHH not enterprise bargaining in the public service. Those of us who were part of the last bargaining round cannot believe it’s almost been three years. I know some departments have yet to finalise their agreements but…
Strategy sins and channel challenges
Is “the media” an audience or a channel? How do you target “the general public”? And other strategic communications challenges. If you work in communications, it is easy to be lazy when writing a communications strategy or plan. You get…
Back to basics: My lessons from working with the Cook Islands Government
Over the past few months, I have been doing some work with the Cook Islands Government. Working on the community consultation for the national economic strategy was a fantastic experience. I don’t often share details about the projects I am…
The importance of having a communications plan
Watch my interview with Amplify about the importance of having a communications plan. I have been working with a lot of smaller organisations recently. A consistent theme is that they don’t have the capacity or capability in-house to write a…
Taking clients with you on your comms journey
Ever wondered why people don’t really care about your communication strategy? You spend weeks perfecting it. Getting just the right tone, great messaging, creating detailed environmental scan. You send it off to the business area or client and…silence. No one…
Communications planning – the key to not getting lost
Let’s say you’re on holiday and you are trying to get to a museum. You know the name of it but not what it looks like, or what street it is on. You don’t know what is inside or whether…