Category Archives: Featured

GONG’S PRO-BONO SERVICES BOOST IMPACT OF CLIMATE ACTIVIST’S EPIC JOURNEY

June 26, 2023 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

Though our Impact Committee which oversees our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) work, Gong Communications, a Wilful Group company provided pro-bono support for climate activist Craig Cohon and his Walk it Back campaign.

After decades of living decadently, the businessman and ex-Coca Cola executive vowed to remove his entire lifetime worth of carbon emissions. As part of this promise, Craig made a tremendous 4,250km walk from Europe to Asia on a fact-finding adventure to create the world’s biggest dialogue on carbon removal and its role in the fight against climate change.

In the lead up to the finish line in Istanbul on 5th June, Gong worked alongside Craig and the Walk it Back team to provide media relations and boost impact, achieving top tier coverage in Sky, Independent, Daily Mail, Yahoo and over 300 international and UK outlets. Gong also provided a social media toolkit for Walk it Back’s partners and additional support with blogs and thought leadership.

Craig said, “Gong Communications was instrumental in delivering media relations and social media support for our team. Gong delivered strategic insights and achieved fantastic media coverage at the climax of our environmental campaign, expanding brand awareness and helping us build a global dialogue on carbon removal.”

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GONG APPOINTED TO EXPAND STX’S SOCIAL MEDIA SHARE OF VOICE

June 12, 2023 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

Gong Communications, a Wilful Group company, has been appointed to provide social media support for STX, a leading global environmental commodity trader and corporate climate solutions provider.

STX is at the forefront of driving global efforts towards reducing pollution and preserving natural resources. For more than fifteen years, STX has been valuing the true cost of emissions and pollution, fostering confidence in carbon reduction and green energy trading.

As part of the project, Gong will devise a social media strategy and create social content to enhance STX’s thought leadership and employee brand, with a goal to spread brand awareness, generate new business leads and attract new talent into the rapidly growing sector.

STX was founded in 2005 to pioneer a nascent environmental commodities industry, and in 2022 was named “Best Trading Company – Renewable Energy Certificates in Europe and North America” for the third time consecutively in Environmental Finance’s Annual Voluntary Carbon Market Rankings.

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When is the right time to hire a PR agency?

June 8, 2023 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

This is a question that frequently arises as companies grow. We have 25 years’ corporate communications experience to draw on in being able to advise on this. We have worked with hundreds of companies at different points in their development, from seed funded start-ups to listed multinationals looking for a reputational reboot or an image refresh. There are probably just 2 key questions that you need to ask yourself when thinking about whether it is the right time to work with a PR agency regardless of size and life stage of organisation.

1. Are you clear on what you want PR to deliver?

2. Do you have enough time and resource to work with a PR agency?

This article addresses question one, with part two to follow next week.

1. ARE YOU CLEAR ON WHAT YOU WANT PR TO DELIVER?

This might seem like an obvious question, but it is more complicated than it may appear. PR is just one discipline in a big bag of ever blurring marketing competencies. If you asked most people to describe what PR means to them, most would say ‘press coverage’, but media relations (or some call it publicity) is just one of the ways in which PR does the job of building awareness, preference and influence with different groups of stakeholders.

Public relations, to give it its full name, can be relevant for all the different audiences that matter to organisations, from perhaps the most obvious one – customers, to others including investors, commercial partners, trade and industry groups, regulators, NGOs and even internal audiences like staff and other companies in a group.

With these potential audiences there are naturally different ways to reach them. The media is certainly one route, but it is by no means the only one. Social media channels are what we PR firms class as ‘owned’ rather than ‘earned’ media and they need content strategies and pro-active management in order to do their work of engaging with relevant audiences. Speaking at conferences and events, organising your own events from attention grabbing stunts, to product sampling, round tables and panel discussions, winning awards, publishing research and white papers, making a podcast or a video, holding a staff townhall – all of these are valid ways of reaching an audience and PR firms get involved in delivering all of them to a greater or lesser degree, depending on client needs.

So, if you know the who? (audience) and the how? (the channel you are going to use to reach them), then you need to figure out the what? Or rather, the content, what you are going to say – your messaging. This is also a very typical part of a PR firm’s mandate, to help clients figure out what they want to communicate when they stand on platforms or give press interviews to make the desired impression. All this may appear to be achingly obvious, but ask anyone who has experienced the messaging inconsistency of a fast-growing company’s leadership team who are all going off in different directions with their own agenda and they will tell you that projecting a consistent and clear message doesn’t happen without some professional intervention. The other classic is the untrained spokesperson who lets slip some information before they should to a journalist, either because they are nervous, distracted or pressured into it.

Let’s assume for the sake of brevity, that you have figured out your messaging, (naturally it flows from your vision and mission), and you have a clear comms plan in place that is going to get your story in front of the people that matter, the only thing left to figure out is how you will know what success looks like?

There are plenty of people who think PR is an expensive waste of time. There are others, like Bill Gates who share the opinion, “If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on public relations.” I would put money on the fact that the main difference in their experience is that those in the Gates camp were clear from the outset what they wanted their PR to deliver and they agreed with their PR team how it would be measured, evaluated and reported on.

Too often, inexperienced people – on both the client and agency side – fail to do this part well enough at the outset. The result is that they discover too late that their expectations were never aligned, or that their understanding of the impact of the outcomes was not the same.

In its broadest definition, (that of attention that has been earned because something was clever, entertaining or thought provoking rather than paid for through advertising or sponsorship) PR can deliver an outsize return on investment.

But it is important to be realistic. One press release about a product upgrade isn’t going to set the world on fire. Generally speaking, to get attention, you need to invest careful thought and realistic amounts of money, but that’s not to say that an unusually creative idea, or a brilliantly charismatic spokesperson won’t generate a huge return on investment (ROI). That’s the holy grail that every client and every PR person is always chasing.

NEXT TIME:

2. Do you have enough time and resource to work with a PR agency?

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Gong Communications Impact Report 2022

June 5, 2023 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

We are pleased to share our 2022 impact report. In a year in which we donated 180 hours to CSR activities, spent 325 hours in training, and recycled 100% of our e-waste, we also celebrated making an impact through communications for our clients tackling urgent issues such as climate change, circular economy, global health, and education.

Click on the image above to download Gong Communications’ B Corp Impact Report 2022.

If you’d like to get in touch and find out more about our work, email us at info@gongcommunications.com

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When is the right time to hire a PR agency?

June 1, 2023 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

In part two of our guidance on when is the best time to hire a PR agency, the second key question to ask is: Do you have enough time and resource to work with a PR agency?

Very often companies hire a PR agency too early before they are fully able to dedicate enough attention to ensuring that it will be a success. So, consider whether you are set up for an agency to succeed. As we explored in part one, success is dependent on good fundamentals. Is there a clear brief? Are we all in agreement on which audiences are the priorities and what we are going to focus on in terms of key messages? Do we know what good looks like?

This sounds flippant, but it gets to a much more important truth about experience. Is there someone on your team who has worked on or in PR before? It’s completely possible to know nothing of the workings of PR and be a great client, you just need to choose the right agency that is experienced at guiding you through the process.

The other major consideration is who is going to be the PR firm’s main point of contact? This may not necessarily be the same as the person who is accountable for PR in your organisation. Setting the strategy and the budgets and judging the results isn’t the same as getting hold of a spokesperson or approving a quote or a social media post on a daily basis.

Different agencies work in different ways, but they all need help to be effective. Let me share an example. An experienced PR client will know that media opportunities need to be acted on quickly. If your PR secures an opportunity for you to provide a comment for something that is in the news, or if there’s a journalist who wants to speak to you, you have to act quickly to secure the opportunity.

Journalists very often have a few conversations on the go because they know that busy executives aren’t always going to be available to meet their deadlines. Similarly, if the PR comes up with an idea they want to pitch to a journalist around specific moment in time or news item, you have to be responsive enough so that they can land it in time. Responsiveness is a biggie. Otherwise you will be wasting your money paying for your PR team to develop opportunities that are going to waste. It’s not only morale that suffers in that scenario: Journalists like people who get back to them as they are usually working to deadlines. If you are a bottleneck, relationships will suffer and you won’t get the best result.

Other ways in which inexperienced clients can unwittingly do more harm than good is in scope creep. Like so many other service businesses, time is money. In order to be a well-run business, PR agencies need to keep an eye on over-servicing clients. If the fee you’ve agreed covers an amount of time or is set against delivery of a particular activity, introducing new tasks and asking for lots of extra calls and meetings uses up the time and takes the focus away from delivery of the agreed deliverables (sometimes referred to as KPIs). And we’re back to creating conditions to enable success again.

One final watch out is whether you have anyone who is happy to step up and actually be the public face of the organisation (if it’s that kind of PR, product campaigns rely less on people than PR that’s designed to work at company level). But again, this can really be a major factor in whether the agency is enabled to succeed. Spokespeople should be media trained. There is no such thing as a ‘natural’ it’s just that experience makes it look easy.

Too many communications consultants may be familiar with a scenario in which you have a request from the BBC for someone to appear on the Today programme, (the flagship business focused morning radio show), the one o’clock news and the six o’clock news. But none of your potential spokespeople are willing to move their day around to do it. So, after many, many calls and conversations and attempts to coerce and cajole the various spokespeople, a day is lost, as is the opportunity that had probably taken months to foster.

The real point here is that someone on the client side needs the authority to make it happen. PR can very often be seen as a discretionary activity by people inside an organisation who are the subject matter experts the media wants to interview. Setting clear expectations on both sides at the outset can be helpful if this situation arises.

Other areas that need addressing are often somewhat creative and therefore often subjective. Writing for a media audience is a case in point. There is an art and science to writing a good press release. Endless rounds of reviewing and revisions of media materials by people inside client organisations can become problematic and time consuming. We have a saying which is ‘be careful who you ask’ because most people have a point of view and will fiddle around with a document given half a chance. This can end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of a press release over-long, overtly salesy and stuffed with bland quotes from everyone and their dog. This segues into a great cliché – why get a dog and bark yourself? If you’ve gone to the trouble of hiring a PR agency, they should be more than capable of advising you on the contents of a press release.

And this is a good place to end. Trust is key. Don’t be surprised if your agency sets out a ‘ways of working’ manifesto that helps to frame reasonable expectations on both sides at the beginning of your relationship. In fact, be happy if they do, because it means they are determined to remove all barriers to doing a good job for you, even the ones you might not realise are there.

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Gong wins again at 2023 Africa SABRE Awards

April 25, 2023 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

Gong Communications was delighted to win two Certificates of Excellence at the 2023 Africa SABRE Awards which highlight superior achievement in branding, reputation, and engagement.

The team was recognised for its work across Africa with clients the Global Institute for Disease Elimination (GLIDE) and Aon, the multinational financial services firm.

The international development communications team has been working with GLIDE as its PR partner since 2021, naming and launching its inaugural Falcon Awards for Disease Elimination (FADE). The team received recognition within the Central Africa category for its media relations support as well as developing and managing the content for GLIDE’s Webisodes Campaign, “Building Awareness to End Diseases of Poverty”.

As D&I communications experts, the Aon team was commended, alongside its African partners Phyllion & Partners Limited, within the Superior Achievement in Research and Planning category for their work on the industry staple, Dive In Nigeria. The 2022 event marked Gong’s third year in supporting the insurance giant’s event and is part of the global Dive In Festival – the largest diversity and inclusion employee engagement brand platform of its type, developed with Gong. This year’s Dive In Festival will be held between 26^th-28^th September 2023 and will include branded events across the globe.

It’s the third consecutive year that the corporate communications team, which operates out of its London and Nairobi offices, has enjoyed success at the SABRE Awards. In 2022 the team won the Central Africa and Media Relations categories for its work with African private equity firm, Birimian Ventures. In 2021 the Aon team won again within the Research and Planning and Public Education categories, receiving a Certificate of Excellence in the Financial and Professional Services category.

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Gong Communications Impact Report 2021

April 22, 2022 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

As a B Corp, we are required to report on our impact.

We are pleased to share our 2021 Impact Report, both in terms of the work we do and the clients we are proud to work for and also to reflect on our own activity.

It might not be the punchiest of reads, but it reflects the core pillars of the B Corp movement, reporting on our efforts to contribute to society, how we play our part in the wider community, the environment and how we use resources, our suppliers and who we choose to work with, and our most precious commodity, our people, and how we operate as a business. We hope you enjoy reading what we’ve been up to as much as we’ve enjoyed doing everything in this report.

Click on the image above to download Gong Communications’ B Corp Impact Report 2021.

If you’d like to get in touch and find out more about our work, email us at info@gongcommunications.com

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Wilful Press Release

October 19, 2021 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

WILFUL AGENCY LAUNCHES WITH CLIMATE INNOVATION FOCUS

Communications taskforce to support low carbon, regenerative economy

19 October 2021, London

Wilful is a new agency that works at the intersection of tech innovation and sustainability to help clients amplify and scale solutions to the climate emergency.

The agency is built on the merger of its founding taskforce members, Cherish and Gong Communications. The agency works internationally from its London HQ with established partner networks in Europe, Asia Pacific and Africa. Digital agency Loud and start-up specialist Little Bear join brand design agency Made With and Gong Creative in the launch taskforce line-up with the additional sustainability expertise of author and brand strategist, John Grant. Wilful’s Chair is Mike Rowe, founder of digital agency group 1000Heads.

The agency launch co-incides with an unprecedented global push to find solutions to the climate emergency and more sustainable ways of living. Investment capital is being funneled to fund climate innovation across all sectors with sustainable food and mobility overtaking renewable energy.
In the first half of 2021:

Private equity firms have raised more than $180 billion of climate finance
VC funding for climate tech topped $16bn
COP26 host Boris Johnson is redoubling efforts to secure £100bn a year in climate funding for developing countries.

And in October, the EU launched its first green bond, the world’s largest to date, raising €12bn to finance member nations’ environmental initiatives.

Wilful co-founders Rebecca Oatley and Narda Shirley navigated the last period of rapid innovation and disruption together in the early 2000s at PR agency Gnash, when the internet inspired a generation of entrepreneurs to challenge the status quo. Wilful is their new joint venture, drawing on their extensive combined experience working principally in digital disruption, finance, development and sustainability.

Commenting on the market, Rebecca noted, “We are in another phase of rapid technology innovation with capital chasing game changing ideas and visionary entrepreneurs. This time, the stakes are much higher, we need to help the most promising innovations to find their audiences to successfully make the leap to a sustainable low carbon future.”

Wilful Co-Founder, Narda Shirley added, “Organisations that are gearing up for the transition to a low carbon future need a communications partner that can keep pace with the speed of change and the ability to react quickly to opportunities without compromising on the quality of the advice. Reassuringly, we are seeing plenty of brilliant innovations out there already, from big corporates as well as from start-ups. The challenge now is to help the best ones get to scale, which is where we believe communications has a key role to play.”

Some of Wilful’s recent work includes support for carbon removal marketplace, Puro.earth, seaweed bio-refinery and industry catalyser Oceanium, and Unreasonable Group, building community between entrepreneurs, investors and institutions to solve pressing global problems.

ABOUT WILFUL
Wilful is a new kind of communications agency that works at the intersection of innovation and sustainability to amplify the ideas solving the world’s biggest problems. The Wilful team is on a mission to help clients in the transition to a low carbon, regenerative economy.

Wilful’s task force approach blends disciplines to deliver an agile and adaptable client service drawing on the expertise of two well established agencies with a complementary focus: Cherish with its track record of working with mass market digital disruptors and Gong with its focus on corporate and B2B, often in sustainable development.

Headquartered in London, Wilful has a global network of partners: in Africa it is anchored by Gong’s business in Kenya and in Europe and the US it is represented by Over There, the group of independent agencies that Cherish co-founded.

Contact:
Jo Hooke: Jo.Hooke@thewilful.com
Richa Kundnani: Richa.Kundnani@thewilful.com

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Gong tapped for Danone and B Lab Employee Engagement brief

September 3, 2021 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

The first free eLearning tool for the B Corporation (B Corp) community has officially launched on the B Corp Way.

This resource can be used by companies which are either already certified as B Corps or are in the process of becoming one. Certified B Corps are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. 

The eLearning tool began life as a bespoke course for Danone, one of the largest multinational corporations to commit to B Corp certification. Created by Gong Communications, in collaboration with Danone and B Lab, it can now be purpose built for any B Corp to build awareness and understanding among employees.

For Danone, the tool has proved critical in making sure its 100,000 employees understand the company’s B Corp ambition and get behind it, whatever role they might play in the business.

Danone has been partnering with B Lab – the non-profit organisation accrediting B Corp certification – since 2015 to help define a B Corp process suitable for publicly listed multinationals.

Alexandra Heaven, Global B Corp Manager at Danone, who led the project, outlines the aim of the programme: “The B Corp movement is about using business as a force for good. It informs choices we make every day at a corporate and an individual level. We are helping 100,000 people at Danone, who are either already in a certified subsidiary, or on the way to certification, to understand how and why the movement is relevant to them. Gong helped us to develop a really comprehensive internal engagement tool – an e-learning programme – that allowed us to educate all our employees on our B Corp mission, regardless of position or how far through their B Corp journey the company is. Gong also helped us to create an internal comms toolkit to support our subsidiaries in promoting the programme to their employees. Since launching six months ago, we have had over 1,500 employees voluntarily complete the course. This course has proved invaluable in getting employees on board and committed to the B Corp movement.”

Katie Hill, B Lab Europe CEO, added: “We first selected Gong for this brief because everyone there was excited by the challenge of building accessible and entertaining content. This product will work consistently for people from different companies, cultures and languages who may not have been in the front line of certification, but who are crucial to our ability to bring about real lasting impact. Having gone through the certification process themselves, Gong can relate to the opportunity for companies large and small to embed the B Corp movement into company culture. We are delighted with the results and are sure it will be an invaluable tool for existing and aspiring B Corp employees.”

The initial four ‘core’ modules are designed to be accessible to all organisations, regardless of size and business model, and are currently available in English, French, Spanish (EU) and Spanish (LatAM).

Module 1: B Introduced – What is the B Corp movement and why is it so relevant now?
Module 2: B Certified – What is involved in B Corp certification?
Module 3: B Inspired – Stories from across the B Corp community
Module 4: B Part of the Movement – How you can be an active member of the B Corp movement and what resources are available to you?

The additional two bespoke modules can be tailored by Gong to reflect any company’s needs and ambitions.

Module 5: B Corp for [Company name] – How your company vision and values align with your B Corp mission
Module 6: B Corp at [Company name] – How your employees can actively engage in B Corp activities in their day-to-day roles

Hannah Hughes, project lead at Gong, which is a B Corp itself, said: “There is a great sense of pride and purpose that comes from working for a B Corp. We are trying to capture and convey that in this project, over and above the clear vision that already shapes B Lab and Danone’s reputation so positively. We are thrilled to have been trusted with such an important task and are looking forward to working with B Corps and future B Corps to further the movement.”

For further information about the e-learning course, please visit: https://gongcommunications.com/about/b-corp-elearning-platform/

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Zambia Forward

August 25, 2021 rachel_eaton Leave a comment

By Vinesh Parmar, in Lusaka

Amongst the economic malaise of the last few years, it seemed as though the Zambian flag had been flying at half-mast. In contrast, the fish eagle soared high above a crowded Hero’s Stadium in the capital Lusaka as newly elected president Hakainde Hichilema was sworn in.

Attendees at the presidential inauguration had packed wings of the venue by 7am. Seems like Zambians can be on time, especially for moments of this magnitude. Again demonstrated ahead of the general election, some voters turned up at polling stations five hours before they opened.

It was those early signs that had the nation feeling that we were on the cusp of change. Voter turnout was at historic highs, as Zambians turned up with camping chairs in anticipation of long queues. The will of the people would be delivered at the ballot box, a triumph and protection of a democracy the country was once renowned for.

As the result was confirmed in the early hours of Monday 16^th August, the nation would prepare for its third peaceful transition of political power. The masses took to the streets, dancing in jubilation as the sun began to rise on a new dawn. The markets seemed to feel the same, with the local currency, the kwacha, gaining almost instinctively against the dollar.

Reaction of the wider regional and international community was equally upbeat. Together we reveled in the history of the country’s largest election victory, by votes. A victory for all Africa as one of the continent’s beacons of democracy again placed their faith in, and were rewarded by, the electoral process.

Through social media, where the election was arguably decided, messages of positivity poured in from all corners of this very young continent. The youth of Africa took note of how decisive their vote could be. This served in many ways as confirmation that Zambia will rebuild itself for generations of tomorrow, while hopefully inspiring others around us to do the same.

When President Hichilema addressed the nation, once confirmed as the president-elect, what stood out was his projection of values. Ahead of the 2016 general election, I had the privilege of being invited to Mr Hichilema’s residence to interview him for my university dissertation. Against a backdrop of opulence, a result of his business success, was a most humble man.

Welcoming, respectful, and gracious, he valued our time and played his role as host very well, even shifting the patio furniture we were sat on into the shade, away from the scorching mid-summer sun.

President Hichilema’s appointment is a significant reminder of the importance of people power and a landmark moment for Zambian and African democracy.

Zambia forward.