Reports and Guides

One voice: a Best Practice Guide to integrated communications
Developing audience-focused communications that deliver a range of aims at the same time will result in stronger impact and greater outcomes for your organisation. This a practical guide to getting buy-in for integrated comms and how to roll out the practice across your organisation.

Team Talk: our guide to comms team structures
This report explores how, as the media landscape fragments and opportunities for greater engagement multiply, comms leads can effectively resource their team to maintain a high level of quality communication across all relevant channels.

HQ and beyond
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. There’s a unique set of challenges in delivering consistent, effective and engaging comms across an organisation spread across multiple locations. This guide looks at 10 key issues identified by internal communications professionals in multiple-site charities.

Working with agencies: How to be a smart client
Most charities buy in outside help at some time or another. It could amount to anything from a huge contract with a major digital or PR agency to an informal arrangement with a couple of freelance designers. The common factor is a supplier offering something an organisation can’t find in-house. Or, to put it another way, charities need agencies to deliver positive benefits as much as agencies need the work.

Show and tell: a Best Practice Guide to portraying beneficiaries and service users
The way a charity talks about its beneficiaries is often a bitter point of contention between fundraisers and communicators wanting to portray clients in very different lights. Our guide aims to help you resolve these dilemmas and create your own guidelines, tailored to your charity’s specific issues, sensitivities and goals.

Harnessing the talent: working with celebrities
Connecting a celebrity to your cause can harness their pulling power of media and public interest and tap into a deep well of talent and influential networks. But the process isn’t without pitfalls. Our guide explores how to decide which celebrities to choose – and whether you’re better off not bothering. It covers how to approach them, what you can ask them to do and how to get the media interested, plus how to develop a celebrity strategy and risks to avoid.

Branding Inside Out: a Best Practice Guide
Clocking in at 84 pages of invaluable information, advice, tips and wisdom, we think Branding Inside Out is a pretty comprehensive guide to everything you need to know about charity branding. It will help you understand what brand is, why it matters and how getting your brand right is the key to organisational success.

Reading Between the Lines – Charity magazines
Have print titles really had their day when it comes to charity supporters – or is there life in the old medium yet? Are there genuine business reasons to make the switch to digital, and who in the sector has taken the plunge? Reading Between the Lines offers an overview of what’s happening in the sector around digital and print magazines and newsletters and compares that to changes in the commercial and public sectors.

A year in the life: our guide to annual publications
The traditional chunky, printed annual report is morphing into different formats, including interactive online versions, DVDs and infographics. Some charities are producing a review as well as or instead of a report. Others are focusing on impact reports. This guide brings together examples of different approaches to inform your deliberations, plus testimonials, tips and advice from across the sector.

Pitch Perfect: linking voice and values – Best Practice Guide
When it comes to your charity’s brand, what you say is as important as how you look. Charities are now reaching beyond the traditional link between brand and visuals to focus on achieving consistency and clarity in tone of voice. Brand language is becoming a communications discipline in its own right. Perfect Pitch helps you get to grips with this important aspect of your brand communications.

Digital transformation: How to get it right in your organisation
The ability of digital and IT specialists to work together in the future is critical for every charity that wants to embrace the potential benefits digital has to offer. In order to help charities move forward on this important issue we have gathered insight from 100 digital and IT leads in UK charities to find out how digital and IT teams can work together to successfully manage and deliver digital projects.

A Beginner’s Guide to Media Licensing in the Charity Sector
We produced this guide to answer some of the questions comms professionals ask when working out where their charity stands regarding media licensing and their media monitoring work. This includes suggested ways to reduce the cost of individual charities’ licences.

Communications and Fundraising: a great divide or a beautiful partnership?
This research report highlights the need to increase co-operation between fundraising and communications teams at leading UK charities. It investigates some of the key causes of friction and frustration and identifies 12 simple steps to help charities move towards a “one team, one target” approach.

Communications Benchmark 2012
Through CharityComms’ contact with communicators from across the sector, we regularly hear about the effect of change, and about the environment in which our members and the wider comms community operate.
The Communications Benchmark is a chance to take a deeper look at these developments. This report is a snapshot of where charity communications found itself in 2012.

Organogram Report: What goes where?
What goes where? The place of communications and digital within charities analyses the organograms of over 40 UK charities of various sizes, causes and turnovers. The report looks at how comms, marketing and fundraising functions are configured, where digital fits into the picture, how things have changed over the past two decades and what the future may hold.  If you are an organisational member and would like a free copy of the report, please email adel@charitycomms.org.uk. If you’re not yet organisational members read about all the benefits.

CharityComms Career Framework
Our unique competency framework provides a guide to the skills, knowledge and personal attributes which communications specialists in the charity sector need to perform their roles to best practice standards. Our Career Framework can be used by comms professionals for their own career development and by managers for their teams.  If you are an organisational member and would like a free copy of the Framework, please email adel@charitycomms.org.uk. If you’re not yet organisational members read about all the benefits.