HOW TO MAKE YOUR STORY WORK FOR MEDIA ACROSS AFRICA
For organisations working across African markets, a strong story is just the beginning. This piece from our sister agency in Nairobi, Gong Communications Kenya, delves what makes a story work for local media. It’s about relevance, timing, proof and the ability to explain why it matters to the audience in that market.
Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation as UK Prime Minister has prompted plenty of political analysis. But for anyone who works with leaders on messaging, media interviews and presentations, there is a more specific lesson.
The issue was not simply that Starmer needed to communicate more. It was that he needed to find a clearer, more human way to explain what he was trying to do and why it mattered.
That is a problem for any leader.
It is also why the usual line that ‘he did nothing’ is too simple. There were things his government said it would do and then did. Workers’ rights are a good example. While not everyone saw those changes as positive, many employers for example have real concerns about complexity and the impact on business, but politically, it was a significant piece of delivery. It was part of the offer. It happened.
And yet it did not seem to cut through.
That is the communications lesson. Delivery does not speak for itself. A policy may pass for instance, or a reform may be introduced. A promise may technically be kept. But if people cannot understand what has changed and how it connects to their own lives, it may not land as progress at all.
Many senior figures have a strategy. They have policy detail, evidence, briefings, announcements and proof points. What they often do not have is the sentence. The clear, human line that explains what they are doing and why people should care.
Starmer’s difficulty was that he often sounded prepared, but was not always understood. Serious, but not always connected. Across interviews, speeches and public appearances, the message often felt managed rather than, well, felt. There was no simple organising thought that people could repeat back.
That is a dangerous place for any leader to be.
If people cannot describe what you stand for, they will fill the gap themselves. If they cannot see how your work connects to their lives, they may conclude nothing is happening. If your language sounds more internal than human, you may look competent in the room but remote outside it.
This is where leadership communication often breaks down.
People don’t experience government, business or institutional life as a list of achievements. People experience pressure, they face uncertainty, frustration and hope. They experience whether they can get a doctors’ appointment, pay the bills, manage work, care for their family or feel that things are moving in the right direction.
Good messaging has to connect with that reality.
On workers’ rights, for example, the stronger communication route would not have been to rely on the language of legislation or the biggest upgrade in a generation. It would have been to keep translating the change into everyday terms. What does it mean for someone who gets ill and cannot afford to lose pay? What does it mean for someone on insecure hours? What does it mean for a small business trying to plan properly? What are the trade-offs, and why does the government think they are worth it?
That is the sort of language people can test against their own lives.
The stronger approach would have been to explain the work in language people could actually use and recognise. And this is something that The Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has done well, using a direct and jargon free communications style.
What is the one thing people need to understand? What is the human problem being solved? What proof point makes that believable? What is still difficult, and how do you acknowledge that without sounding defensive?
Those questions matter in a media interview, but they matter just as much in a board presentation, a town hall, a pitch or a crisis statement. Leaders are judged not only on what they do, but on whether they can make people understand the purpose behind it.
This is not about becoming more performative. It is not about chasing charisma or trying to sound like someone else. In fact, that is often where leaders get into trouble because audiences can feel when tone is being bolted on. The real skill is finding language that is clear enough to travel and authentic enough to believe.
Sir Keir’s communication often seemed to sit somewhere between policy language and political slogan. ‘Change’ was too broad to carry the weight of government. The missing piece was a more concrete expression of what that change meant in everyday terms.
Before any major speech, media interview or public moment, the test should be simple. Can you say what you mean in a sentence a real person would understand? Can you say it under pressure? Can you say it without sounding as though it has been written for you? And can your audience repeat it afterwards?
If the answer is no, it’s not ready for the public.
Starmer’s departure will be analysed politically at length. But from a communications point of view, it is a reminder that leadership depends on more than plans, policies or competence. At some point, every leader has to stand up and make people understand. He never quite did.
(With thanks to Pippa for the original inspiration behind this article).
A corporate reputation strategy should begin with a simple question. What would make this organisation easier to trust?
Not easier to like. Not easier to recognise. Easier to trust.
That distinction matters. This year, at Anthropy, the leadership conference focused on creating a better, fairer Britain, two conversations on the trust deficit and the role of reputation in national prosperity returned to the same idea, that trust is not a warm value or a communications theme. It is a condition for leadership. It’s the thing that allows people to follow, invest, support, work with, forgive or believe an organisation when the stakes are high.
One contributor described trust as predictability. We trust people and institutions when we can predict that they will do what they said they would do, especially when circumstances become difficult. Trust is not only a value. It is behaviour under pressure.
This is the point many organisations underestimate. Trust is not built in the moment of scrutiny. It is built in the months and years before, through consistency, competence and the way leaders respond when they are challenged. It arrives slowly and leaves quickly. Or, as one Dutch saying quoted during the discussion puts it, trust comes on foot and leaves on a horse.
The context is not forgiving. People are becoming more insular in where they get information and who they are willing to believe. If audiences are more fragmented, organisations cannot assume that authority, scale or goodwill that has been built up over the past will carry the argument. That makes the role of business and institutions more important, not less. One of the more useful ideas from the panel was that leaders increasingly have to act as trust brokers. Not by smoothing over disagreement, but by creating spaces where shared goals can be found, tensions can be acknowledged, and people can argue without losing sight of common purpose.
That calls for empathy and active listening, but above all it calls for courage. Leaders need to be able to speak with candour, even when the message is uncomfortable. They must make difficult trade-offs visible where they can, and resist the temptation to govern by opinion poll.
Trust becomes harder to earn when people feel they are being managed rather than informed. That does not mean every detail can or should be shared in every situation. But it does mean organisations need to communicate in a way that is accurate and grounded in reality.
The behaviours that damage trust are often not dramatic. They are the small decisions that make people question the organisation’s judgement. Claims start to run ahead of the evidence. Important context gets left out. Communications is used to make a difficult situation look tidier than it is.
That is why communications needs to be involved before the message is written. For boards, CEOs and leadership teams, the value of communications is not simply in finding better words after a decision has been made. It is in helping leaders see whether that decision will stand up to scrutiny, and what needs to change before the organisation asks people to believe it.
Trust is earned through what an organisation does and how it communicates when people are watching closely. Communication also has to be two-way. Listening that changes nothing is not listening. Compassion that leaves behaviour untouched is sentiment. Purpose that is not delivered becomes branding.
The panels were clear that trust rarely collapses because of one act. It is weakened by patterns people start to notice such as leaders sticking to a line after the evidence has shifted, organisations hiding behind partial transparency, cultures that blame elsewhere, or a gap between public values and private behaviour. Each can feel small or explainable at the time. Together, they start to erode trust.
That is why reputation risk communications should begin before there is a visible issue. The useful question is not “what would we say if this became public?” but “what are people already experiencing that would make our explanation harder to believe?”
The answer is often cultural. Do people feel safe enough to raise bad news, and can leaders hear criticism without becoming defensive? Is there room to say “we got this wrong” or “we have changed our mind” without that being treated as failure? Vulnerability was raised in the trust discussion not as a performance of openness, but as evidence of leadership maturity. Politicians should take note. A policy U-turn can be weakness, but it can also show that new evidence has been heard. The media has a role here too. If every change of mind is treated as humiliation, leaders have little incentive to learn in public. In a culture that treats every change of mind as weakness, it takes discipline to show learning in public.
The same themes appeared in the discussion on national prosperity. Reputation and trust were described not as soft intangibles, but as economic assets. Admiration and respect do not simply happen. They come through performance, genuine engagement, stewardship and confidence that an organisation will still be here, and still be behaving responsibly, in ten years’ time.
That matters for large companies, but it is just as relevant to mid-sized businesses, charities and public-facing organisations with leaner teams and smaller communications budgets. Trust is not a luxury reserved for institutions with large corporate affairs departments. It is part of the licence to operate.
Crisis makes this visible. One panellist reflected that a crisis can destroy value, but handled well it can also build it. The formula was not complicated: grip, action, then communication. Not communication instead of action. First, show that someone capable is in charge. Then explain what is being done.
Many organisations may not have a crisis in front of them, but they may already have a trust gap ie between what the business promises and what stakeholders experience; between the confidence of the leadership team and the confidence of employees; between the ambition of the strategy and the evidence available to investors, customers or communities.
The organisations that handle this best tend to work from the outside in. They make the customer, beneficiary, employee or community the centre of the story. They understand that a stakeholder communications strategy is not a static map, but a live reading of who needs confidence, what they fear, and what proof they need. There was a strong reminder from the charity and community sector here. Smaller organisations often hold deep trust because they put the individual at the heart of decisions. They may look messier than large institutions, but they can be closer to lived experience. Larger organisations have something to learn from that proximity.
The leadership challenge is also changing. Results matter. But the best leaders act as stewards as well as operators. They create a future others can believe in. They stop behaving as the hub through which every answer must pass. They trust their teams, build human connections and make it safer for the organisation to tell itself the truth. This is not a softer view of leadership. It is a more demanding one. It asks for clarity about why the organisation exists, simplicity in how decisions are explained, and delivery that people can see and feel. It asks the question one panellist put plainly. The ‘so what?’
So what changed for the people we serve? So what did we learn? So what are we doing differently because we listened? So what would make someone trust us more tomorrow than they did yesterday?
The same questions will become sharper as AI changes how organisations make decisions and explain them. That deserves its own discussion. For now, the test is simpler: if technology makes trust harder to earn, is it strong enough inside the organisation itself? Trust is built long before a moment of scrutiny. It grows when organisations do what they said they would do, and when their behaviour under pressure matches the promises they make in calmer moments. It is strengthened when leaders listen early enough to change course before confidence is lost.
For any company, charity or institution operating in public view, the work is not to sound more trustworthy.
It is to become easier to trust
There was a time when a pitch deck could get by on content alone. If the business made sense and the founder could carry the room, that was often enough to secure a second conversation. That world has changed.
Today, a founder can open an AI tool and generate a perfectly acceptable deck in minutes. The result may be clean and usable. For an early draft, that can be genuinely helpful. But is it ready to design the deck you put in front of investors?
Not quite.
The problem is that investor decks are not just presentation documents. They are judgement calls, made slide by slide. What belongs on the slide? What should be left unsaid? Where does the story need proof? When should the design get out of the way? That is where human design still matters. A good deck does not simply organise information. It guides attention and makes the business feel more investable.
Here are the principles we follow when building investor decks that do more than look polished.
A deck is often the first proper encounter an investor has with your company. Not just the idea, but the character behind it.
That does not mean plastering the logo everywhere or turning every slide into a brand showcase. In fact, over-branding can feel insecure. Good branding in a deck shows up in the confidence of the typography. It is there in the restraint of the colour palette. It appears in the way each slide feels unmistakably part of the same world.
AI can imitate a style. It can suggest a palette. What it cannot always understand is whether the design feels true to the business. A climate-tech deck should not feel like a crypto launch. A healthcare deck should not feel like a lifestyle app just because that style is fashionable. The visual language has to support trust in the business and make the company feel coherent.
One of the quickest ways to spot a weak deck is through decorative visuals. Stock imagery used or icons dropped in because a slide looks empty. Diagrams that make a simple idea harder to understand. Strong decks use visuals with a job to do.
A product screenshot can make the use case click in seconds. A well-structured chart can turn traction into momentum. A customer quote, used sparingly, can bring the problem into the room in a way a paragraph never will. Ask, does the visual make the point faster or sharper? If it does, keep it. If it is only there to make the slide feel less bare, take it out.
This is where an experienced designer becomes very useful. Not because they make things prettier, but because they know when a slide needs presence and when it needs discipline.
Founders often want to include everything. That is understandable. You have spent years building the business, so every detail feels important. Investors do not experience the deck that way. They are scanning for signal. They want to understand what matters and whether they believe it.
A strong slide usually has one job. Sometimes that job is to explain the market. Sometimes it is to prove demand. Sometimes it is simply to make the investor feel the scale of the opportunity. White space is not wasted space. It is what allows the important thing to land. This is also where AI-generated decks often fall down. They tend to fill space because they can. A human designer knows that restraint is often what gives a slide authority.
Consistency matters, but repetition can really kill attention. A deck where every slide follows the same structure starts to feel flat, even when the content is strong. Investors may not consciously notice the repetition, but they may feel the energy drop.
For instance, a bold market insight might deserve a full-screen statement. A traction slide might need a clean chart with very little else competing for attention. A product slide may work best when the interface is allowed to take centre stage. Good variation should feel paced rather than random. It gives the story shifts in emphasis to keep people engaged and interested. This is something templates struggle with.
A pitch deck should evolve as the business evolves. At pre-seed, the deck may need to work harder to sell the problem and the ambition. Later on, investors will expect more evidence. The design should shift accordingly, making traction easier to read and performance easier to trust.
Different investors also look for different things. A generalist may need more context around the category. A sector specialist may want you to get to the proof faster. The deck should be shaped around what they need to understand, what they are likely to question and what will help them believe.
A good designer will not just ask, does this look good? They will ask, who it’s for and what needs to land by the end.
The biggest mistake is treating design as the final polish (that along with giving it to designer the day of the pitch!).
By the time a deck reaches the ‘make it look good’ stage, many of the important decisions have already been made. Sometimes the story is too dense. Sometimes the order is wrong. Sometimes the strongest point is buried halfway down a slide. Design is not decoration at the end of the process. It should be part of how the argument is shaped.
A senior designer may challenge what belongs on the slide in the first place. They will see when a chart is trying to do too much, they might spot those repetitions that often creep in when people become over familiar with the copy. That is the part AI has not solved. It can produce options quickly, and those options can be useful. But it cannot sit with the nuance of a business, understand the room you are pitching to and make the all important judgement calls. A strong investor deck shows that you know your business. A well-designed one shows that you know how to communicate it.
We build decks that bring design and content together from the start. Not just to make a presentation look better, but to make the story easier to understand and believe in. Gong is a strategic corporate communications advisory firm, part of The Wilful Group. Our creative portfolio can be found here.
WHAT IT TAKES TO DELIVER PAN-AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO PROJECTS
Strong storytelling across multiple markets in Africa takes more than well organised logistics. This piece from our colleagues at Gong Kenya reflects on what it takes to deliver visual storytelling well across borders.
WHY ANTHROPY FEELS DIFFERENT IN A DIVIDED BRITAIN
Anthropy is unusual in the best sense. It’s a gathering that brings together leaders, practitioners and voices from very different backgrounds to debate Britain’s challenges openly, honestly and with real respect for difference. That breadth of perspective, and the quality of the exchange, is what makes it matter. Read reflections from our team who attended.
Photo Courtesy Blue Earth Forum.
More than 25,000 firms in the UK entered insolvency last year according to the UK Insolvency Service. They were not only early-stage start-ups. The average age of a company that closed or dissolved was 4.5 years with a significant number being established businesses with traction and meaningful revenue.
Investors are still backing companies. They are just backing fewer of them and asking harder questions first. Financial performance determines whether you are in the room but in a competitive funding market how you articulate risk, strategy and judgement often influences whether capital is committed.
This was a recurring theme when our team was invited to run workshops at the Blue Earth Ventures Forum, hosted by HSBC Innovation, alongside the Blue Earth Summit team. In conversations with founders, investors and advisers, a theme that surfaced is that investors are listening more carefully to how leadership teams talk about risk and strategy.
We were not there to advise sophisticated founders on how to structure an investment memorandum or refine an elevator pitch. The room did not need that.
The conversation was about what rarely gets written down.
In later-stage rounds, the financial model clears the first hurdle. The leadership team determines whether conviction follows.
Once fundamentals are broadly comparable, investors are underwriting judgement. They look closely at the senior team and ask questions that go well beyond performance metrics:
The most effective leadership profiles track closely with the business narrative. They show authority, market understanding and restraint. They do not drift into commentary or causes that create reputational drag.
When funding is selective, investors pick up quickly on any disconnect between the founder’s profile and the company’s story.
A short video can create excitement. A well-timed announcement can generate attention. But sophisticated investors separate noise from substance quickly.
Reputation tends to build quietly through execution. Over time, investors look for evidence that leaders do what they say they will do and that milestones are met without unnecessary noise. In more selective markets, that steady pattern of delivery carries real weight. Publicity may create visibility, but confidence is built through consistency.
Many private companies assume they should appoint a PR firm once a round has closed, when there is funding to announce. In reality, the more strategic question is about readiness, not publicity.
As we have written previously on when to appoint a PR firm, the trigger is not size but complexity. When scrutiny increases, when leadership visibility rises, and when the narrative needs to withstand investor due diligence, communications shifts from execution to counsel.
At that stage, the value is not just media coverage, it is pressure-testing the leadership narrative, aligning personal and corporate positioning, and identifying reputational risk before investors do.
Waiting until after the raise often means reacting to scrutiny rather than preparing for it.
In selective markets, difficult questions cannot be deferred.
Investors listen carefully to how leaders frame uncertainty. Do they acknowledge constraints? Are they realistic about execution risk? Can they explain trade-offs without defensiveness?
Over-claiming can undermine confidence, but so can excessive caution. The most credible investor narratives are not polished to perfection. They recognise complexity and demonstrate that risk has been understood and managed. That balance usually reflects a leadership team that is aligned and comfortable with scrutiny.
Investors rarely assess a business on the pitch alone. They form a view from multiple signals, including how aligned the wider organisation appears.
If internal teams are unclear on strategy, or if partners and suppliers tell a slightly different version of the story, that inconsistency tends to surface.
Employees and close stakeholders are frequently the most credible advocates a company has. When they understand and believe the direction of travel, that confidence reinforces what leadership is saying in the room. When they do not, the gap becomes visible.
For that reason, investor storytelling works best when it sits within a coherent corporate narrative. It should feel like an extension of how the company already communicates, not a temporary layer applied for the purposes of a raise.
Capital raising is intense, but it is not an isolated event. Companies that treat investor communications as a short-term exercise often find themselves rewriting the story under pressure. Those that approach it as part of a wider reputation strategy are better prepared.
In a more selective funding market, numbers will always matter first. However, when multiple businesses present similar fundamentals, leadership credibility and narrative discipline can influence who ultimately secures the capital and who does not.
Our sister agency Cherish sets out a practical guide for founders navigating early-stage PR decisions.
The right PR partner depends on where a business is in its growth journey and what is at stake. Our sister agency, Cherish, works closely with UK tech startups and has published a thoughtful guide on how to choose a PR agency in the early stages. At Gong, we are typically brought in when those choices carry wider reputational, commercial or leadership consequences, and when communications needs to inform strategy, not simply execute it.
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. 
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
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.
