What makes a great strategic communicator? Some might say it’s the ability to spot opportunities and plan ahead. Others might point to quick thinking when a crisis hits, or the knack for connecting people and ideas.
Well, according to research, it’s all of this and so much more. For more impactful communications, it’s helpful that communicators have a mix of strategic skills and attributes.
Inspired by our Strategic Communicators’ Conference, we’ve created an assessment quiz and an accompanying resource with the support of consultant, Amy Hanson-Reed, to help you define your strategic style, recognise hidden strengths and discover opportunities for growth. You may even find you display more than one strategic style in your role, informed by your environment and experiences. This is not a standardised test, it’s a reflective tool to guide you through your strategic growth opportunities.
Once you’ve completed the quiz, you’ll get a breakdown of your results and a comms pack so you can share your style profile with your team and network – and even compare results. Most importantly, you’ll get access to some practical resources to build your strategic style in the short and long-term.
The six strategic styles
We’ve crafted six strategic styles based on our research. The assessment quiz will give you a full breakdown of all your strategic styles and which is your dominant approach. The questions have been crafted to look at strategic communications through a series of strategic skillsets based on four core competencies: being visionary, being analytical, being operational and being relational.
The resource you can download after you’ve filled in the assessment quiz will provide you with more answers and exercises.
However, if you’re curious to have a peek at the answers before you start, you can browse the short style profiles below.
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Lead the way with the Strategic Communicators’ Conference 2026
Designed for busy comms and charity leads, the Strategic Communicator’s Conference explored emerging trends and challenges shaping the sector. If you’re looking to strengthen your strategic approach, you can still catch the recordings on demand.
SPOILER ALERT – Find out more about the strategic styles and skillsets
The firefighter
Your strategic profile: Resilient. Pragmatic. Decisive. You’re the person people trust to bring clarity and direction when the unexpected hits.
Your natural edge: Your strength is responsiveness. In fast-moving charity environments, this is vital. It’s often what protects reputation, reassures colleagues, and keeps work moving when the pressure is high. You instinctively know where to focus attention, bringing calm and clarity to the table.
Your growth opportunity: You shouldn’t change your instinct to act. Your development opportunity lies in making your strategic thinking more explicit and visible.
Top tips: Build in processes and systems that allow you to grow your strategic visibility like regular strategic check-ins or clarifying intended outcomes to check how it connects to wider objectives. When delivering work, explain why a particular approach has been chosen, not just what is being delivered.
Get more tips in our ‘Building your strategic style’ resource when you take the quiz.
Join these conference talks to help you make strategy more visible:
- Influencing upwards: How charity comms leaders can make the case for comms
- Case study: Creating a shared strategic comms planner
- Demonstrating comms impact and making data-driven decisions
The architect
Your strategic profile: Intentional. Advocate. Innovative. You’re the person that makes clear blueprints.
Your natural edge: Your strength is intentionality. You see how the pieces fit together and instinctively look for frameworks that give communications structure and legitimacy. You know organisational dynamics and can influence stakeholders. You are often the person advocating for comms at senior level, translating activity into strategic value and ensuring all work aligns with organisational goals.
Your growth opportunity: Your strategic opportunity lies in not taking on more responsibility – it’s distributing it across the team.
Top tips: To build internal advocates, start with identifying one colleague and actively involve them in shaping or presenting strategic thinking to senior stakeholders. Turn your frameworks into simple, shareable tools that others can use confidently, so that strategy shifts from something you hold to something the team carries together.
Get more tips in our ‘Building your strategic style’ resource when you take the quiz.
Join these conference talks to help you teach others:
- Keeping the fire alive: creating stories people want to gather around
- The Emotional Edge: practical coaching techniques
- Harnessing strategic partnerships to cut through and drive change
The landscaper
Your strategic profile: Empathetic. Collaborative. Intuitive. You’re the colleague who builds bridges between teams, audiences and work.
Your natural edge: Your strength is connection. You connect the dots to help strategy feel collaborative rather than imposed. You are skilled at translating different perspectives, finding common ground and turning conversations into momentum. You root strategic decisions in relationships as an empathetic and collaborative leader.
Your growth opportunity: Your opportunity is not to connect more, it’s to focus that connection with greater strategic discipline.
Top tips: Clarify the specific strategic objective before bringing people together. After gathering input, summarise decisions clearly so momentum isn’t lost in discussion. Introduce simple data points into conversations to anchor perspectives and instincts with evidence. In doing so, you use your natural relational strengths to drive measurable strategic progress.
Get more tips in our ‘Building your strategic style’ resource when you take the quiz.
Join these conference talks to help you free up your focus:
- Trends to watch out for: preparing charity comms for 2026
- Case study: Creating a shared strategic comms planner
- Reframing reputation for comms leader
The mechanic
Your strategic profile: Realist. Technical. Focused. You’re the person that maintains the balance and provides trusted and technical input.
Your natural edge: Your strength is reliability. You understand how the systems work and you keep them running. You bring technical expertise, strong oversight and a commitment to best practice. You plan capacity, optimise workflows, and understand the realities of delivering strategy at an operational level. In complex charity environments, that stability is strategic.
Your growth opportunity: Your growth opportunity lies in making the time and space for new ways of working and innovative solutions. Don’t abandon what works – create deliberate space for improvement and experimentation.
Top tips: Schedule periodic reviews of business-as-usual activity to identify where effort could be redirected towards higher-impact work. Build partnerships that bring in fresh thinking without destabilising core systems and balance technical oversight with curiosity about new methods or tools.
Get more tips in our ‘Building your strategic style’ resource when you take the quiz.
Join these conference talks to help you find new approaches:
- How new tech can make traditional advertising more effective and affordable
- Shelter: evolving supporter journeys to better meet supporter needs
- Harnessing strategic partnerships to cut through and drive change
The pilot
Your strategic profile: Adaptive. Insightful. Creative. You’re the ideas person who brings everything back to the vision.
Your natural edge: Your strength is drive. You share ideas, generate energy and are comfortable taking calculated risks. You are often the person who sets the direction. You help teams, campaigns and projects hold onto their sense of purpose, keeping things steady during change. You’re good at collecting insights and spotting trends to craft the “big picture” storytelling that lands. Your work is always strategic, drawing back to charitable purpose but pushing practice into the future.
Your growth opportunity: The opportunity for you is not to slow down. it’s to strengthen your impact by pairing pace with reflection and plans. This will help to ground your big ideas into the operational reality.
Top tips: Before launching a new activity, define what success looks like and how it will be measured. Build in short review points with your team to assess progress. To help with both points, develop simple evaluation frameworks that are built into your projects from the start.
Get more tips in our ‘Building your strategic style’ resource when you take the quiz.
Join these conference talks to help you to ground your vision:
- Demonstrating comms impact and making data-driven decisions
- Trends to watch out for: preparing charity comms for 2026
- Preaching to the choir: breaking out of the charity comms ‘bubble’
The inspector
Your strategic profile: Credible. Analytical. Detailed. You focus on the data, measurement and actionable insights that ensure your comms is reflective of what’s happening.
Your natural edge: Your strength is careful, evidence-led thinking. You value accuracy, clarity and strong reasoning, especially when conversations move beyond vanity metrics and show return on investment. You bring discipline to measurement and ensure decisions are grounded in data rather than assumption. In a sector where impact matters, that credibility is powerful.
Your growth opportunity: The opportunity is not to analyse less, it’s to ensure your insight leads confidently to action by bringing people on the journey with you.
Top tips: Translate complex findings into simple, compelling messages for non-specialist audiences. Develop your influence in senior forums by using data storytelling techniques, framing evidence around organisational priorities.
Get more tips in our ‘Building your strategic style’ resource when you take the quiz.
Join these conference talks to help you tell the story of impact:
- The Emotional Edge: practical coaching techniques
- Keeping the fire alive: creating stories people want to gather around
- Communicating through change
Strategic skillsets
From our research, strategic skills break down into four main competencies:
- Being visionary: The ability to see opportunities and/or make change. For example, creating innovative solutions or optimisations to processes, spotting trends or articulating big-picture thinking that gets buy-in.
- Being analytical: The ability to derive meaning from data and offer objectivity. For example, reviewing analytics, measuring the impact of comms or delivering constructive feedback.
- Being operational: The ability to think about the system and processes you work within and set up plans accordingly. For example, understanding of the needs and roles of different departments, clear and deliberate delegation, and strong project management skills.
- Being relational: The ability to connect with others to support colleagues, be emotionally intelligent, and inspire action or buy-in. For example, empathetic leadership, active listening skills or building strong partnerships.
In our ‘Building your strategic style’ resource we share what these qualities look like in everyday practice. Take the quiz to get your exclusive access!
Research and approach
Key research links
- The CharityComms Career Framework – a framework to support professional development within the charity comms sector. Explores strategic skills like relational and visionary leadership.
- The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development core knowledge maps – outlines skills and competencies for key strategic remits like management and culture. Explores analytical and relational behaviours that are core to organisational value.
- The five practices of exemplary leadership from Leadership Challenge – a globally recognised leadership model rooted in decades of research. Connects to multiple threads of the skillsets and competencies identified, mostly visionary and relational, which reflect their “inspire a shared vision” and “enable others to act” pillars.
- The Government Communication Service communications model – the framework used by the UK Civil Service for strategic communications. The “MCOM” (Modern Communications Operating Model) talks about insights and ideas being essential for high-impact strategies.
- The Global Capability Framework led by the University of Huddersfield – a research-led resource for communications, exploring strategic advisory as skills in trust-building and narrative-setting.
- The AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework – The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communications outlines the strategic value of communications, outlining the role and impact it generates.
- NCVO ‘Strategy and Impact’ resources – a series of helpful tools and information that help charities align their work with their core mission.
- Forbes on the 20 underrated qualities of great marketing and comms leaders – a collection of insights from comms experts that outline the skills that drive strong results.
- Four essential Traits of a Strategic Leader from CASE – a framework for leadership development for professionals in educational and non-profit sectors.
- The Gold Standards by the International Association of Business Communications – a global standard set by global comms professionals. Covers six core principles as the building blocks of comms work.
- Harvard Business School explore how to develop strategic thinking skills – a review of mental habits for effective strategists.
Our approach
We used research to define core competencies and skillsets, using this to draft strategic style profiles, create questions and map them back onto the style profiles. We ran a few simulations through Gemini AI to test the mapping and refine the questions. We worked with a strategic consultant, Amy Hanson-Reed, and ran internal reviews to sense-check our materials, refine the profiles and accompanying resource, creating tailored advice for each style.