By Rachel Roberts,

150 PR Professionals gathered at Birmingham City University’s School of Media for the second Midlands PR Conference, exploring the theme of the ‘Business of Communications’. Jointly staged by the CIPR and PRCA Midlands committees, the full day Conference bought together communications professionals from across all sectors, inhouse and consultancy and included keynote speakers, panel debates and two practical breakout sessions from across eight specialist interest areas.

Highlights from the Conference, together with exclusive interviews with three speakers, BBC Royal Correspondent Jonny Dymond, AMEC Chairman Richard Bagnall and Rob Markwell from Pitch Consultants, are available in a specially created podcast.

On the Conference agenda was a cracking line-up of speakers, who also included AI in PR Vice Chair Kerry Sheehan, Worcestershire NHS Director of Comms Richard Haynes and Sheila Taylor, CEO of Child Sexual Exploitation support organisation NWG Network, providing a unique perspective on the business of communications from their own expert viewpoint.  However, across the range of insights, common themes emerged, including the impact of technology, society cultural changes, media diversification and the continued challenge of demonstrating how effective communications can deliver ROI.

Reflecting on the subjects discussed, it seems that whilst we’re working in a chaotic, ever shifting landscape, the message from all speakers was that organisations can be more in control of their narrative through strong leadership in communications.  So many external factors will be beyond our control – whether its Brexit, politics, the economy, the growing impact of China, the dominance of Google, Facebook and Apple – but as communications professionals we can take the lead in our own organisations and help organisations perform better by harnessing the power of effective comms.

But how do we take the lead if we’re not in the room? To influence the board, John Brown, Founder of comms agency Don’t Cry Wolf was passionate that PRs need to have a seat at the boardroom table.  If we’re not in the room, we need to get into it, demonstrating confident leadership as communications professionals, but also using our influencing skills to translate our creative and tactical ideas into strategic business solutions that will get buy in from the CEO and FD.



Helping our case to influence business strategy could be through better use of credible data.  The C-Suite uses data to evaluate performance across all functions – sales data, people retention, finance and operational performance.  Yet in marketing and comms, we’re still presenting dodgy dossiers with meaningless numbers according to AMEC Chairman Richard Bagnall.

Help is available to generate the data and insights to make a better business case and influence the board through the AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework tool.  In particular, the Measurement Maturity Mapper tool has been created to benchmark an organisation’s use of data against industry best practice to assess how measurement is being used to for performance reporting, planning and to measure impact.

One story that doesn’t need to be measured for impact is clearly Brexit and with the Conference being staged hot on the heels of deadline day, it was inevitable that the elephant in the room could not be ignored.

In this respect it was timely to hear insight from Jonny Dymond, particularly how the reputation of UK plc is being viewed internationally.

Clearly, Brexit deliberations are set to continue for some time, but whilst the reputation of UK political leaders has taken a bashing, Dymond observed that the UK still benefits from the strength of its soft power, with the Royal Family, the BBC, marquee brands and sporting achievements helping to keep the UK on the global stage despite our political and military power being significantly less than it was.

In summary, the outtake from the Midlands PR Conference was that to lead, we need to communicate, so as communications professionals our opportunity to influence is huge – but we need to be in the boardroom so the business of communications is always on the agenda.

Rachel Roberts is Founder of spottydog communications and Co-Chair of the Midlands PR Conference.

Images courtesy of Mr Ladd Media