#nhs4xmasno1: a powerful message is not just for christmas

December 22, 2015 Darren Caveney

An NHS choir are making themselves heard through song. It's a campaign to show timely support. There's plenty to learn from this.

by Sally-Anne Watts

Over recent weeks I’ve been watching as word has spread about the campaign to make ‘Bridge Over You’ sung by the choir from Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Trust the Christmas number 1.

It’s a simple enough message – show your support for something you believe in and help others by downloading the song. It doesn’t cost much and you will feel good afterwards. What’s not to like?

an epic twitter chat – what we learned from #idealcommsteam

October 12, 2015 Darren Caveney

We thought it would be interesting to begin hosting a couple of Twitter Chats each month on key challenges facing the community. We kicked off with this great session on the 'ideal comms team' - it sparked a flurry of tweets and over 1.1million potential Twitter impacts.

by Ben Capper

You can always count on the comms2point0 to pitch in with ideas and thoughts when you ask them.

Last Wednesday's #IdealCommsTeam lunchtime Twitter chat was a true example of this.

The expertise, the experiences (good and bad), the challenges and the triumphs came thick and fast during a cracking hour of discussion in response to my comms2point0 post on the Ideal Comms Team last week.

Just as a reminder, there were a few key rules to the questions we asked during the conversation:

your new 3-person comms team. who makes the cut?

October 6, 2015 Darren Caveney

Very rarely in life do you get to choose a brand new comms team from absolute scratch. You normally inherit folk and work with what you've got. But what if you had a blank sheet and the chance to choose. Who would make the cut?

by GUEST EDITOR Ben Capper

Let’s just say you were creating a Comms team totally from scratch.

Let’s also say it can only include three people.

Sure, you could always buy in a bit of agency time here and there, but that’s essentially your lot.

Who makes the cut? Who doesn’t? Why so?

Would this be the same as it would have been five years, or even a year ago?

How do we future-proof ourselves? What experience, and what attitudes would you want to see?

being the clip art and comic sans police. and why it matters.

July 25, 2015 Darren Caveney

Brand identity is hugely important and many comms folk will relate to this post on the subject. It's an instant classic. Print it out and put it on your office wall today...

by GUEST EDITOR Ben Capper

comms2point0 is one of my favourite websites.

There are loads of interesting ideas and a great community. There’s stuff on here that helps me to find solutions to issues on a daily basis.

Not very colourful though is it?

Don’t know about you, but sometimes I think it’s crying out for a bright splash of pink, maybe with some orange writing on it.

And that typeface. It’s OK for some people I guess, but surely something friendlier, some more hand-writing-ish would make it look, you know, just a bit nicer.

signs of health: ill or good?

July 23, 2014 Darren Caveney

How are you today? In good health? Health is massively important, to everyone. And communications is a vital if relatively recent professional function in the NHS. So why is it that it is often misunderstood, ignored or mistreated?

By Alan Taman

There are many PRs whose employers or clients misunderstand what PR is. The role of the PR then includes education about the realities of the profession and the process. But it is ironic that, to most health professionals, the communications function as it relates to public relations is something they are unfamiliar with.