How communicators are thinking SMART

The recent Melcrum Summit saw communicators gather in London to hear from their peers, network and learn who is doing what in the world of internal communications right now.

As part of the event an afternoon session was held by INVOLVE here in the UK, where comms pros worked through some SMART (Specific,  Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based) thinking.

AshleyHere Ashley Freeman (pictured), the agency’s Head of Sales and Marketing writes for my blog to let us know what we missed. Over to you Ashley…

All is back to normal at INVOLVE HQ, after a great few days catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones in the world of internal comms at this year’s Melcrum Summit & Awards 2014.

Every year, the summit is a great chance to celebrate smarter internal communications, reassess its changing role in today’s business environment, and share thoughts and expertise with a huge network of peers in the industry.

Every year we are blown away by the quality and insight of what the summit has to offer, and this year was no different.

melcum logoThere were three days of “carefully curated inspiration” – lightning talks, webinars, presentations and brainstorming sessions. It means that we can stay current on internal comms and employee engagement trends and stops us from sitting back on our backsides!

(You can read more about the Summit via the Melcrum blog and read my article on the Awards here including my tips as an awards judge – Rachel).

With a focus on how we can be smarter about internal communication, each presentation explored the role of structure, strategy and storytelling in internal communication, and what trends we can expect in 2015.

Speakers including Victoria James, from employee engagement award-winning AstraZeneca:

Plus Paul Dolan of Happiness by Design offered valuable contributions on issues like how to analyse employee behaviour, the importance of internal comms in today’s business world and how to engage a global workforce:

Get S.M.A.R.T

On the last day, the INVOLVE team made our contribution to the Summit. Using the 2014 Award Nominations as stimulus, we encouraged attendees to brainstorm the most relevant comms challenges highlighted at the Summit.

They were identified as:

  • Working with leaders
  • Increasing brand value through IC
  • Changing behaviour, not minds
  • The role of IC – development & management
  • Catalysing change through digital

B0EMth3IQAAe7Q2Once we had the whole audience engaged and enjoying a sugar-rush courtesy of the tasty treats in our free goody-bags (pictured), we got them involved in the session with a fun and innovative game of Get SMART Trumps!

In our alternative version of the popular card game, each comms solution became it’s own top trumps card, and was scored in each category on the S.M.A.R.T scale out of ten: Specific,  Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based.

This was an involving way to make all the fun and insights of the 2014 summit relevant and transferable to the attendees’ own organisations, and the internal comms challenges they face.

Sharing successes and failures

What is always humbling is how generous the internal comms community are with sharing their own experiences, successes and failures. We are all on a constant learning curve, and adapting to new challenges all the time, as so there is so much to be learned from others’ observations. It allows us all to be better, and better serve our clients’ needs.

Involve Visual VoiceThere was so much going on over the three-day summit, and it is difficult to summarise it all. Candid camera shots, selfies, captivating content, interesting videos and innovative infographics captured all the action.

Our in-house illustrator @TheVisualVoice was also on hand to summarise events as they happened in thought-provoking illustrations (see image on this page).

If you missed anything, all the best stuff was shared live, moment by exciting moment on Twitter using the popular and trending hashtag #melcrumsummit!

Follow us on Twitter @Involve_UK or check out our Google+ page to see the action as it happened, or for a summary of all the talks, check out Melcrum’s Live Video blog from the event.

Thanks goes to everyone involved with the organisation of this year’s Summit. Thank you to Melcrum, and to all the speakers, attendees and organisers for another great event, and congratulations to all the deserving award winners!

Post author: Ashley Freeman.

Thank you Ashley. Did you go to the Melcrum Summit? What did you think of it?

Further reading

Rachel

Published by Rachel Miller 28 October 2014.

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