At pitches, there’s always lots of big agency talk about ‘really getting under the skin’ of the client. Which when you think about those actual words, is a bit scary. But, it is true that you can’t come up with great work if you don’t know your client.

With this mind, Claire, Rachel and Gemma headed off to Burger King to join their crew for a day. Relax, they were heavily supervised so that any food they produced was up to BK standards! They had a great day, pics are below and we’d like to thank everyone at Cannon Street for letting a bunch of account handlers cause chaos and a particular big thanks to Nana for excellent induction and Silvia for her limitless patience!

I am delighted to report that we have begun work on a project for CHEP as a direct result of contact made at the HR Directors Summit we attended at the end of January. We are excited about the prospect. Not only is CHEP a large international organisation that performs a complex and fascinating role in global logistics, but our first project is entirely concerned with internal communications, a key and growing area of our activities.

As some of you know, last year we invited clients to build their own Christmas card from us with the incentive that the winner would receive £100 to donate to their favourite charity. Well, I’m happy to announce that after careful consideration and against some fierce competition, Ed Howarth from East Sussex County Council has emerged victorious.

So that’s £100 on its way to Canine Partners who train dogs to help people with disabilities to complete everyday tasks.

Well done Ed, you’ve obviously missed your calling!

Two of us attended an HR Directors Summit in Birmingham last week. This is one of those events where organisations like us pay a lot of money on the promise of a number of guaranteed one-to-one meetings with the great and the good of the HR world. New business speed-dating if you like. It was an experience. The down side is that it involved two days shut in a hotel at the NEC wearing a suit and a fixed grin, manning a stand that looked good (no, it really did) but few people wanted to stop at because they were really there to learn about flexible benefits or open learning or something. So the opportunities for constructive networking were actually fairly limited. That said, we did have 16 prearranged meetings of 30 minutes each. We had spent a long time preparing for each of these and, on the whole, were rewarded with constructive conversations on topics that mainly centred around Employer Branding and Internal Communications. It’s not an approach to business development I would recommend for the faint hearted and it is early days yet as we begin following up the leads. But we hope the investment proves worthwhile and will keep the blog updating with news. Watch this space!