All mod comms

Although everything on this site is about communicating, these internal/employee and external comms reduce it down to its very essence: information. That doesn't mean they can't be interesting or creative though*, as I've shown for clients including Tesco, Network Rail, Barclays and Arsenal.

*Lots aren't by the way, I just haven't included those here!

I helped plan and write Tesco’s Privacy Centre, an approachable and easy-to-use site which not only presents Tesco’s policies on privacy, cookies and data use, but which also provides a range of general online safety advice.

It needed to feel welcoming, reassuring and engaging, so in addition to a warm, non-corporate and consumer-facing tone of voice, where possible I came up with diagrams and animations to help lighten the copy load.

Network Rail - recruitment toolkit

I helped to devise and create a recruitment toolkit for a large department at Network Rail - Infrastructure Projects. Our aim was to establish IP as a major destination for engineering talent in the UK.

This toolkit needed to sell the department, its ethos, its impact and its future as much as it needed to advertise specific roles. And who better to do this important job than the people already meeting IP challenges head on?

I wrote everything IP would need to run consistent and hard-hitting ongoing recruitment campaigns, including headlines, introductory paragraphs and a range of sample copy for them to use. I also ran workshops to help the team understand the toolkit’s aims.

The kit was so successful, we were asked to do the same thing for Network Rail as a whole.

Barclays

Having worked with Barclays for almost ten years, I've had the chance to create all kinds of comms, for colleagues and customers. Some personal highlights would include:

Mission Packs for Brand Agents – internal brand champions responsible for letting colleagues know about the latest marketing activity.

In-branch animations to keep customers amused while queuing and to excite them about their new flagship Manchester branch.

A huge branch environments/coffee-table book project that captured all aspects of the UK across one week in the summer.

Network Rail - Dover Sea Wall

The Dover Sea Wall had collapsed, suspending the train services that ran along its top.

I was in the team which came up with and delivered a communications plan to manage the situation and Network Rail’s relationship with local people and passengers.

It was clear to me that local people wanted to be kept in the loop. But I didn’t believe that they really wanted or needed detailed information on every step of the process. My thinking was that regular, bite-sized pieces of information would not only keep the audience up to date and engaged, but would act as a record of the project over the next 12 months.

To support regular disruption comms, each month we delved into details about the project and used the most interesting or impactful stories to write and design a poster to be used in stations & other key points along the disrupted journey, and to be emailed to customers.

Every month the renewed poster gave a sense of progress, while providing new facts and figures for the local community to talk about.