Winning formula

Winning team: Elliott House with Kantar Operations at the IoIC awards. (l-r) John Liddle, Ian Feeney, Cheryl Liddle, and from Kantar Operations: Richard Coombe and Baljit Thandi

We don’t like to brag, but Elliott House Communications has just won two communication awards.

The Institute of Internal Communication (IoIC) held its Central Region Awards on Friday 24 February and we were named Class Winner in the best Electronic Newsletter category and also won an Award of Excellence in the Best Electronic Design category, for the newsletter we produce with Kantar Operations.

More than 100 of the region’s top internal communicators attended the glittering award ceremony at the Radisson Blu, East Midlands Airport.

The interactive monthly newsletter was developed in conjunction with the internal communications team at Kantar Operations, as a key tool for its Worldwide CEO, Sharon Potter, to communicate with staff based in the UK, North America and India about the direction of the business. The newsletter also goes out across the wider Kantar group of companies.

To be shortlisted alongside the region’s best communicators was already an achievement – but to win is an excellent result for us and the team at Kantar Operations.

Communicating consistently across three diverse regions is always a challenge but the innovative newsletter, which allows readers to interact with the content, has received much praise internally. We are thrilled that it has been recognised by its communication peers at the IoIC awards.

Like I say, we don’t like to brag. But we are rather proud. 

The Elliott House team with the trophy – John Liddle, Cheryl Liddle and Ian Feeney. 

Romantic communications

Love is in the air – well according to Hallmark and the 24hr supermarkets that were still selling flowers at midnight to last minute love makers.

In the rather chilly month of February, you can set your heart aglow with some commercial tat from the loved-up shops. Over-priced flowers (unless you made it to Tesco in time to buy the £5 dozen red roses it had on offer – who said romance was dead?), bumper boxes of chocolates and cuddly teddy bears that will spend the rest of the year gathering dust before you recycle them and that garish heart cushion in time for next year's haul. 

Don't worry, I am not going to cast misery over this rather marvellous love-drenched day. I am someone who is always happy to throw my full and sometimes quite frankly ridiculous support over all traditional events. (I am renowned for my annual Grand National party, not to mention Eurovision – although things haven't been the same since Tezzer's departure.) I just think it's amazing that we need a day to help us to communicate how much we love/like/fancy someone.  

Generally, words come easy for me as I spend my days tapping away at my computer at Elliott House Towers but for those that just can't confess their all, perhaps they need a nudge from Mr Valentine and his cohort of romantic retailers. 

Maybe we should celebrate that we have at least one day in the year when lovers, partners, husbands, wives, admirers and stalkers can actually say how they feel or at least get some help with expressing it. 

It's just a shame that we have to rely on the retailers to put those words in our mouths. Often the cheesy lines and forced innuendo mask any originality and personality. 

As silly as it sounds – it's a problem that often crops up in the corporate world. Now, I'm not suggesting that people should confess undying love in their company communications – but language is a powerful thing and should be used wisely. 

We often plump for words that we wouldn't normally use in every day talk. Using February 14th as an example, would you say: 

"I would like to utilise today to leverage my feelings for you so that I can yield a high return." 

Perhaps, we should just dump all the jargon and say, I love you. 

Much easier. More understood. And will probably get a much greater return on investment. 

So, on this day of loving and giving – here are my top words and phrases to 'dump' from your comms and some new, much better looking versions for you to fall in love with: 

DUMP                                  DATE

Utilise                                    Use 

At this point in time               Now 

Commence                            Start 

A large proportion of            Lots

Paradigm shift                       Major change 

Outside the box                     Creative

Blue-sky thinking                  Creative

Actionable items                    Things to do 

Buy in                                    Agree

Deliverables                           Tasks

Going forward                       In the future/from now on (if you need to use it at all)

Operationalise                        Do

Ramp up                                Increase

Strategic solutions                 A plan

Happy Valentine's Day from Elliott House Communications! 

Why readers matter most

We're a little bit excited at the moment because we've just been shortlisted for TWO awards at the Institute of Internal Communications awards for the central region. We're competing against the great and the good in the area and so it's fantastic to be recognised by our peers.

The publication that has been shortlisted is a monthly interactive newsletter we produce for employees of a global company. We ensure the content can be understood by a multi-lingual readership and make the newsletter easy and interesting to navigate.

We also have to think creatively for new ways to design and present the corporate information each month to keep it engaging for employees so they want to read about the future direction of the business.

Although awards are really nice (and fingers crossed for the 24 February everyone), even better news came recently when we were able to evaluate the monthly click-through rates on the newsletter. After two years, the numbers of people looking at the newsletter keeps on increasing and the new quarterly 'special' issues are attracting higher numbers too.

There's no denying, we're dreaming of that big awards trophy, but the truth is, the most important judges of our work will always be the readers.