You are a comms officer, hard at work on a brochure when a director from a different department appears at your shoulder. Glancing at your screen, they suggest you try a different background colour – then wait for you to do it.

This picture of my parents was taken in 1963, a year before they got married. It intrigues me, in the circumstances, that they managed to pose for a studio photograph like some confident, conventional, middle-class couple.

Strategic planning can seem like a daunting task, but it is simply a means to setting your charity’s goals and figuring out how to progress them. Just like a strategy for any other area of work, a communications strategy begins with the overall vision and purpose of the organisation. Specific goals about your messages and media channels then spring from that central purpose. There is no point

Sometimes, the client-agency partnership gets strained or falls apart. Why? Because the agency and the charity don’t understand each other, says Kay Parris

Kay Parris, freelance journalist and former editor of Reform, asks whether deregulation is jeopardising workers’ safety

Children's novel The Fantastic House, by Jennifer Lewis, which I edited and published, was a finalist in the Wishing Shelf Awards for independent publishers. A number of schools participated in the judging process. Here are the comments we received:

Like most double acts, Rowan Williams and John Sentamu are chalk and cheese. Rowan the academic, John the populist. Measured Rowan, excitable John. Rowan the poet, John the standup comic

The first trick is to spot when you have a potential story. After that, the ABC of dealing with the media is to tell the right people your news, in the right way, at the right time.

Communicators working at charities spread across multiple sites will be all too familiar with the sense of ‘them and us’ that can divide central office from branches, groups or regions. “HQ never engages with local issues!” is a common cry, along with “We never see anyone from head office!” And most will recognise that sinking feeling of half the time being told you’re bombarding people with information, while spending the rest of your day dealing with disgruntled colleagues who claim you neve

As an internal communications professional, you’ll often find yourself in situations where you need the backing of senior management. You might be working for greater transparency, urging speedier reporting of bad news, or explaining the need for better communications by different layers of management around the organisation. Perhaps you’re working in a communications role without a strategy endorsed by your senior management team. Maybe you find yourself setting up promising communications cha

Faced with a burgeoning array of options and imperatives, communications professionals have a lot to consider when planning how to let others know what their charity has been up to all year. But what do charities actually need to produce each year, and what are the pros and cons of going the extra mile beyond the statutory minimum?