After nearly a year of running Clearview Communications, the agency has navigated significant challenges in a turbulent environment. Through strategic integrity and adaptability, it has delivered meaningful work despite economic pressures and changing client expectations, particularly influenced by AI. The focus remains on trust, insight, and community growth.
Author Archives: Kirk Ward
OPEN LETTER to NHS Chief Executives
In the face of financial pressures, Clearview emphasizes the critical role of strategic communications in public service transformation. Cutting these teams can lead to long-term issues like loss of trust and coherence. Clearview urges leaders to recognize communications as essential for effective change, rather than a support function, and to invest thoughtfully.
Stakeholder Engagement: why honesty is essential
Over promising and under delivering burns through trust and alienates audiences and stakeholders. Attendees of the Clearview Stakeholder Engagement Masterclass (February 2025) discussed a number of different engagement models and how they can apply to different contexts and organisations. They also received a free copy of the eBook, Clearview Explainer: Stakeholder Engagement Models, which looksContinueContinue reading “Stakeholder Engagement: why honesty is essential”
Stakeholder Engagement: an art and a science
It ain’t what you know, it’s who you know. Or something. Effective stakeholder engagement is a critical element of strategic communications, but so many organisations struggle to move beyond reactive and unplanned interactions. They are, basically, winging it. The Clearview Stakeholder Engagement Pathway provides a structured, step-by-step process to ensure that engagement efforts are purposeful,ContinueContinue reading “Stakeholder Engagement: an art and a science”
The difference between narrative and messaging
I worked with a relatively new Chief Executive who was seemingly obsessed with having the right ‘narrative’. A meeting to discuss changes to how the organisation approached a particular service – we need a narrative. A journalist calls to ask about a pending court case – what’s our narrative? The local MP wants to comeContinueContinue reading “The difference between narrative and messaging”
Transforming Communications in Local Government
Change. Challenge. Opportunity. These three words are at the heart of the UK Government’s latest devolution white paper. For CEOs, senior leaders, and communications professionals in the public sector, this moment represents far more than a shift in governance structures. I’m putting the politics of it aside and I’m looking at things with a strategicContinueContinue reading “Transforming Communications in Local Government”
NEWS: Clearview to provide strategic communications and digital marketing support to national charity
Clearview will support a sector-leading national charity for the next three months, it announced today. It will provide strategic communications support and bespoke digital marketing campaigns to OnePlusOne, the UK’s leading relationship research and innovation charity. OnePlusOne uses its expertise and research to help make people happier at home and at work with a rangeContinueContinue reading “NEWS: Clearview to provide strategic communications and digital marketing support to national charity”
Stakeholder engagement: an essential step in strategic communications planning
Stakeholder engagement is the difference between telling people something and having a genuine two-way conversation. It’s harder than it sounds though. It involves working out who your stakeholders are, how interested they are, what impact they might have, how to reach them and then crucially, listening to and acting on what they say. What isContinueContinue reading “Stakeholder engagement: an essential step in strategic communications planning”
OPINION: The accidental President 2.0 – what can communicators learn
There’s a foundational myth about President-elect Donald J Trump, that he never actually wanted to be President. And yet, here we are, counting down the days until the most unlikely leader of the free world takes his place in US political history (again). The first felon to be elected US Commander in Chief. Only theContinueContinue reading “OPINION: The accidental President 2.0 – what can communicators learn”
NEWS: Clearview responds to ‘big, bold and bruising’ Budget
The first Budget to be delivered by a female Chancellor was big, bold and bruising. The headlines suggested a somewhat traditional Labour Budget, a return to the rhythm of tax and spend. Closer inspection of the document itself shows more of a focus on business and growth than the record-breaking tax burden and pre-Budget mediaContinueContinue reading “NEWS: Clearview responds to ‘big, bold and bruising’ Budget”
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