At the UnAwards Winners’ Masterclass, last year’s champs shared their paths to glory – and there were some welcome signs that communications teams are finally being let into top tier decision-making.
by Karen Pagett
Read more40 things I learned at the unawards winners masterclasses from 15 brilliant speakers
I have blogged recently about the fact that there are many, many free learning opportunities open to us in the era of small/no training and development budgets.
by Darren Caveney
Read morewhy are we so obsessed with communications evaluation?
The AMEC Summit, held for the first time in London last month, sets in motion an approach with wider implications than just evaluating the impact of communications.
by PANEL WRITER Neil Wholey
Read moreif working from home is a skive, working in the office is a waste of time
We ran a post on how working from home can quickly descent into time wasting and late night making up of time. You can read it here. One comms person disagrees.
by Ben Odams
Read morehelp st john ambulance beat starbucks and co to be brand of the year
St John Ambulance has made it through to the shortlist of Marketing Week's best brand category. Wonderful. But forget Boaty McBoatface. Wouldn't it be tremendous if they won? Here one of their comms team explains what it would mean to them.
by Emma Shepherd
Read morethe magic of the internet (that I think some people forget)
We’ve all become so used to using websites, updating pages and sharing content. But, sometimes, it’s helpful to get a reminder on good and bad practice…
by Susie Crossland
Read moreyou gotta fight….for the right – to write content
Everyone wants their website to look great, right? But we often see organisations forget about the content. Not so at one local authority which has invested in improving the content it shares with its customers.
Read morehousing magazines – do they have a future?
snapchat for mass communication: a case study
Snapchat works well with youunger people. But using it as an organisation? How would that work?
Read moremy favourite app: in praise of uber
Good apps are heart to find. But for one comms person a taxi app that is revolutionsing travel stands out.
by Rob McCleary
Read morepr people, stop talking ourselves into the next recession
A comms person who deals direct with industry has a clear message for comms people. Quit the negative talk about the economy.
Read morewhy faceless civil servant is never a good look
We've come a long way, baby, as country singer Loretta Lynn once sang. Once, the idea of using social media in the public sector was bold and revolutionary. Now it is common place. Perhaps the greatest thing about this is that it puts a human face onto civil servants who are human too.your chance to learn from the unawards winners. for free
The UnAwards15 were my highlight of 2015. Having the opportunity to see the passion, creativity and results from some of the brilliant work taking place across the UK and beyond was quite a privilege.
The UnAwards ceremony was a belter – well, I swear I heard someone say that on the day.
It was a unique event which placed an important spotlight on our industry and in a way which was accessible to everyone regardless of budget or grade.
After the event, many of you asked for the chance to see and hear more about the winning work.
So, with just one shake of a billy goat’s tail, we have organised an UnAwards Winners Masterclass.
Actually, that’s a lie. We have organised three. This gives us the chance to take the Masterclasses around the country with regional events taking place in Leeds, Birmingham and London.
Be nice: what a free calendar can teach you about community management
What a 2016 desk calendar from Instagram teaches about community management. Nb. Cute animal alert.
by Dave Musson
One of the biggest social networks in the world sent me something nice in the post and I’m instantly falling over myself to praise them to the hills. Is my loyalty really that easily bought? No, actually, there’s a lot more to it. In fact, Instagram offers a fascinating insight into good community management.
Now we’re all into the swing of things again, I can get away with asking this question…how was your first day back at work after Christmas? Good? Hard? Some other four letter word? I hear you.
After toiling through that most Monday of Mondays, I came home to a wonderful surprise; a parcel sealed by tape covered with the Instagram logo! Inside was a 2016 desk calendar, made of up of cute photos of animals published by the Instagram community last year, along with a sweet little note from ‘your friends at Instagram’ – how awesome is that??
what winning an unaward has taught me
It's good to write. It's an excellent creative outlet and can provide a real spark to the thinking process. but there are, understandably, reasons why some people feel uncomfortable in publishing their work - if that's you, then this post aims to allay your fears.
by GUEST EDITOR Emma Rodgers
Recently, I was very honoured to be shortlisted in the comms2point0 UnAwards best guest blog post category. The post was shortlisted alongside four other posts which were all there because they were the most read on comms2point0 during 2015.
All five went forward to a public vote. I’ll be honest, I didn’t think I had a hope in hell of winning but amazingly (against the odds in my opinion) win, I did. It made me very proud and extremely grateful to those people who voted for me (thanks if you did).
And it also got me thinking. Of late I haven’t been writing many blogs.
death of a president
History teaches us many things. Not least how we have responded in times of crisis.
"The Lincoln continues to slow down. Its interior is a place of horror. The last bullet has torn through John Kennedy's cerebellum, the lower part of his brain.
"...at first there is no blood. And then, in the very next instant there is nothing but blood...Gobs of blood as thick as a man's hand are soaking the floor of the back seat..."
I recently read The Death of a President, William Manchester's brilliant unflinching account of the events leading up to and the aftermath of the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963.
You can see the Wikipedia entry about the book here.
Everything is in here, from the paintings on the wall of the hotel room where Kennedy spent his last night alive to the layout of the emergency room the president lay in at Parkland Memorial Hospital as doctors tried vainly to save his life.
#nhs4xmasno1: a powerful message is not just for christmas
An NHS choir are making themselves heard through song. It's a campaign to show timely support. There's plenty to learn from this.
Over recent weeks I’ve been watching as word has spread about the campaign to make ‘Bridge Over You’ sung by the choir from Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust the Christmas number 1.
It’s a simple enough message – show your support for something you believe in and help others by downloading the song. It doesn’t cost much and you will feel good afterwards. What’s not to like?
notiz - a new neighbourhood app for residents comms
A new app has been developed which enables councils to send neighbourhood alerts on a whole range of service information. And, importantly, with very precise targeting abilities.
By Simon Jones
Imagine if there was a form of Twitter where at a touch of a button you could decide if the message went to a single house, street, neighbourhood – or even an entire town, city or county depending on the need.
It would revolutionise comms around things like bin collection changes, road closures, school closures and planning apps – right?
Think about the savings of never having to produce a direct mail again – let alone the reputational value of keeping residents informed.
united we stand
Managing a team can be a tricky business. Balancing egos, personalities, ideas, grafters, blockers and dodgers. The best teams usually boast a natural leader. Or two.
by Phil Jewitt
There’s a film called The Damned United which tells the story of the managerial partnership of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor. Together, they successfully led Derby County and Nottingham Forest to football glory in the 1970s but not so successfully* after they went their separate ways. For those too young to remember or not remotely interested in football, you can replace Brian and Peter with Ant and Dec, The Hairy Bikers or any other successful partners.
It’s probably fair to say none of them would have achieved the success they jointly have without the relationship they created and maintained and their understanding of each other and their teams.
Recent posts by Darren, Paul and Simon explained similar experiences of being a Head of Comms. Relevantly, they all talk about relationships, supporting and being supported by their teams.
the periodic table of internal communication
The periodic table was created in 1869 to bring together all the known chemical elements under one roof enabling them to be studied, discussed and understood. Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev also predicted the discovery of other elements, and he purposely left spaces open for them.
We’ve recently worked with Chuck Gose, Corporate Communications VP, speaker & host of the internal comms podcast, ICology to replicate this original idea for internal communicators. And with hundreds of downloads from comms pros worldwide, it’s already proving to be very popular…
The Idea
The idea was to create a table of terms that would bring together all the elements of internal communication under one roof. We split the table across seven categories: Strategy, Objectives, Themes, Audiences, Formats, Channels and Metrics and populated each category with a number of common comms terms. From there, we’ve built the Periodic Table of Internal Communication, which you can download here.
A cracking response
The feedback so far has been fantastic. We’ve been overwhelmed with the positive responses…
