Brutal honesty isn't in vogue any more, but it should be.
There's too much bullshyte in the world.
Too many people blowing wind up other people's skirts, with onlookers believing it as much as the now-knickers-out person.
But I'll tell you something: Getting rid of the guff makes for faster deployment.
About a year ago, I was engaged by an institute within an Australian university to come up with a new communication strategy. Their goal was to be visible and understood.
That understanding was both public and internal.
That visibility was benchmarked against another institute that had PR people, several business development officers, the sexiness of current issues, and huge budgets.
The institute I was working for had:
* zero staff
* almost no money
* deep partnerships
* inability to talk about their work (commercial-in-confidence projects).
This meant that the bulk of the work was down to the Director and whomever he could get in his pocket.
Like all communication strategies, the work required deep research in order to understand the intentions and outcomes of the institute's partnering organisations. The research revealed that many of the publicly-stated environmental matters that garner those partners media were *actually* driven towards their own revenue.
I can't tell you what they were for privacy reasons, so let's imagine it was 'water efficiency'.
The media picks up on 'water efficiency' measures and makes it a Big Environmental Deal that Makes Humans Feel Guilty. The media spins a Lowest Usage campaign.
But tracing the line back to the originating organisations - who are accused of using loads of water - we discover that Lowest Usage is actually a proprietary term. Lowest Usage describes new products for those organisations.
Therefore, helping them uphold it results in real revenue.
Scanning through the communication assets of the institute, I was able to:
* recommend website changes
* recommend ways in which to work in lock-step with the parent brand
* recommend ways to use one-way communications as briefings
* recommend methods that are lightweight, cost-effective, and above all *easy* to deploy.
Within a week of receiving the recommendations, the institute's Director had already deployed half of the recommendations.
Additionally, the parent brand's marketing team were on board with changes, and were actively spinning out new ideas to complement it.
The institute has gone from success to success and is now rebranding. You know what that means? More investment.
When I worked with them, they didn't know if the institute would live beyond 12 months.
If that's not a huge success, I don't know what is.
Getting the right consultant to help you derive the right return is priceless. My client not only forged deeper relationships, they became clearly understood, gained a north star that made better and more coherent sense, and has gained fresh investment from the parent organisation. Win. Win. Win. Win. Win.
When's the last time you worked with someone who helped you derive such a deep return on your investment?
xx Leticia 'value uber alles' Mooney