Life in a comms team can certainly be busy, but you don’t need to always try and keep your head above water by yourself. Over the years, we’ve helped our clients with a huge range of projects, from developing comms plans, to crafting case studies, to sourcing merchandise.
Filling the gap
When frazzled communications managers have needed temporary support to plug gaps left by absences, we’ve stepped in with a proverbial life raft. A client needed short-term help to keep everything running smoothly as they underwent a recruitment drive, and our flexible way of working meant we could step in at a moment’s notice to tackle whatever arose. Knowing we were there to help with ad hoc tasks, including drafting consistent messaging and effective communications plans, gave the comms director the headspace she needed to focus on the bigger picture.
We’ve also used our experience to create banks of case studies, write blog posts and pull together annual reports – doing everything from interviewing team members, to gathering stats, to sorting out the design and print.
If you’re reluctant about taking on an external agency because you don’t want a whole extra team of people to keep tabs on, you needn’t worry; you’ll have a single point of contact who will provide regular updates on where everything is up to, so you don’t need to liaise with multiple people at once. We take a proactive role with our clients, meaning we often think of ways to help before our client has even thought of it themselves! We have regular check-in calls to ensure all tasks are running smoothly, and sometimes make suggestions for ways to run things even more effectively.
Launching and tidying up websites
As well as requests for interim support, our clients sometimes approach us for help with more specialised projects – such as overhauling a website or launching a new microsite. We’ve helped get several new sites up and running by taking care of the copy; we’ve liaised with the client to establish what needed doing, agreed key messages to ensure flow through the entire website, and then provided sample pages and maintained communication throughout to confirm we were going in the right direction.
Whether our clients have had nothing but the bare bones of copy for us to develop, or plenty of copy that just wasn’t delivering the way they wanted it to, we’ve been able to work with it and ultimately make their websites stronger and more effective.
Taking care of annual reports
While annual reports are theoretically straightforward to put together (just two key elements: content and design) we know that, in practice, they’re a significant time investment that you may not be able to afford. When annual report time rolls around, we’re often approached by clients who need someone to manage the project from start to finish while they focus on other priorities; we’ll work closely with them, checking in with relevant team members to pull together the required information and write and edit the copy, before perfecting the design and printing aspects.
There can be a number of fiddly bits involved in creating an annual report – not least of which is presenting the accounts section accurately in an engaging document. We’ve done so many annual reports now that we’ve created a free resource about how best to tackle them.
Crafting tender bids
When clients have documents pulled together by many different team members, they often need an objective comms professional to pay attention to detail and ensure there is consistent tone of voice and messaging across the copy. Our combined experience as a team means we can step in to help at the drop of a hat. We’ve worked with clients to ensure tender questions are answered thoroughly while sticking to tight turnarounds and keeping everything within the word count.
Of course, crafting the perfect tender bid does not just mean writing the content; we also provide proofreading and editing services to ensure consistency across the document, and we can take care of the practical side of things to upload all the information to the tender portal and press ‘submit’.
Our mission
Our mission is to make our clients’ lives as easy and stress-free as possible; as long as it’s comms-related, pretty much anything goes. No task is too small or too large; if you only need a raft for the next couple of weeks or so, external support can be both flexible and short-term and, if you don’t have a specific project in mind, that’s fine too. Whenever an extra pair of hands is needed, we’re there to help.
So, if you have a project you need an outside perspective on, or are just overloaded and could use a hand to pick up the slack, drop us a line today.
