On May 19 we held the Conference on the History of Internal Communication at Brunel Business School. This is the first time that a conference has taken place on this subject. Over sixty practitioners and academics attended. We had two keynote speakers, sixteen presentations and a closing panel. The whole event was filmed by Billy Abbot. We will soon be posting the entire event online in order to disseminate the conference to those who could not attend. We will also be posting the slides of the sixteen presentations from the conference and the two keynote speeches. In the meantime we would like to release this taster video to give a flavour of this memorable day.
Michael provided the first keynote speech, ‘A Five Stage Model of Internal Communication: Past, Present and Future’. Following this we had the first of our parallel sessions where eight presentations were given on the history of internal communication by academics and practitioners. After lunch we had the second of our parallel sessions and a further eight papers. Following this, our second keynote speech was given by Marc Wright, founder of simply communicate and one of our project partners. Celebrating his forty-six years working at the forefront of internal communication, Marc provided a highly insightful and entertaining talk on ‘A Personal View of Internal Communications: From the 1980s to AI’.
We ended with a panel discussion on ‘The Past, Present and Future of Internal Communication’ which had some of the leading figures in IC today in the UK: Rachel Miller, Howard Krais, Cat Barnard, Nadine Dixon and Katie Macaulay. We were also honoured to have Professor Mairi Maclean join us. Following an excellent discussion on the importance of history to IC, we concluded with a myth-busting activity. During the day conference attendees had posted their ‘Myths of IC’ on a Whiteboard. Panelists chose their favourite myth and discussed this with the author and audience. Prizes were given to the authors of selected myths. We ended with awards to presenters which recognised the excellence of their contribution to a highly successful conference.
We would like to thank our former marketing students Roza Tabakci, Alice Pestana Rosario and Min Kim for helping us with the conference. They provided engaging and professional help all day. Many thanks also to Billy Abbott for his expert filming of the entire conference and Howard Krais for all his advice and support. We would also finally like to thank Brunel University of London for the use of their excellent facilities for the conference.
On Monday 29 June, we held a workshop for the history of internal communication at Goodenough House in Central London. We invited our project partners and close associates to the workshop. Eighteen people attended. This included our partners from the IC profession, from the Chartered Institute of Internal Communication (IOIC) and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and archivists from the Postal Museum, Boots UK and the British Library
The aim of our project is to enhance a knowledge of the one hundred and fifty year history of internal communication in the UK amongst the IC field and the importance of this history to their professional practice. The project has so far been highly successful in terms of dissemination and engagement within the IC profession and community. Our next step is to make a meaningful contribution to the IC field based on our research which delivers value for the profession. This is commonly referred to as social impact: https://www.ukri.org/councils/esrc/impact-toolkit-for-economic-and-social-sciences/defining-impact/ . The goal of the workshop was to establish what this impact should look like and how we could achieve this.
The day consisted in three introductory talks by Michael on the project, from Dominic Walters, President of the IOIC, and from Sophie Clapp, chief archivist at Boots UK. Following this, participants engaged in brainstorming and discussion, followed by rich feedback sessions on the value of the project to the IC profession and corporate archives, the potential impact of the project, strategies for delivering this impact, and plans for a follow up second conference on the history of internal communication for practitioners and academics in 2027. We established that the impact of the project should focus on enhancing professionalisation in the IC community, in instilling a sense of confidence and conviction within IC practitioners, and in using the past to help IC cope with the challenges of the future. Strategies for achieving this included developing a history pack for IC practitioners which included mini historical case studies on how IC practitioners had overcome challenges in the past in areas such as technology, employee transformation and organisational change. Another strategy, suggested by Advita Patel from CIPR, was to hold a series of workshops for IC practitioners and archivists across regional centres in the UK, based on the one held at Goodenough House. There was also strong support for a second conference on the history of IC in 2027.
We would like to thank all our project partners and associates for taking part last Monday. It was wonderful to have them all in a room and to obtain their insights. And most of all, it was great to spend a day with them! The positive energy and engagement in the room all day was incredible. We are so lucky to be able to work with the IC community and corporate archivists and British Library on our project. Without them, this crucial project on the history of the IC profession would not have been possible.
