News & views

We’re pleased to be running a community consultation exercise for MIA Property Group, one of Birmingham’s most established family-owned developers.

MIA is planning to redevelop the rundown site of a disused community centre in the Ladywood district, close to Birmingham city centre. The company is proposing 144 one, two and three bedroom apartments to breathe new life into the area, in line with Birmingham City Council’s policy – given the scarcity of vacant land - to build ...

I enjoyed talking at Fundraising Intelligence Conference 2021 last week about how to manage your reputation in times of crisis.

Charities, social enterprises, non-profits and public bodies are, of course, just as susceptible to reputational disasters as private companies. The sector was rocked last year by a large-scale ....

I see NCVO – the hundred-year-old charity supporting Britain’s non-profits – has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. With a damning investigation uncovering a deeply “toxic culture” and its board bluntly admitting it’s all true, there are several curious points that strike me from its reputational crisis. The independent investigation was carried out last year, with its findings revealed at that point only to NCVO staff. But it's all come to the fore as the report has just been leaked to charity publication Third Sector, which has run a blistering ...

A London law firm has just won £25,000 from High Court action against a client who posted a negative review online - and is seemingly now battling the repercussions. The court found the client's TrustPilot review defamatory, and the firm said it lost business. But how much might it lose now its client management 'technique' has hit national headlines - headlines that will forever come up when anyone searches for ...

We’re running a wide-ranging marketing programme for innovative tech startup Tradecraft Tools, which has developed the world’s first app enabling trade professionals to manage their business via their smartphones. Freeing up four hours or more a week for fee-earning work, it can help users add at least 20% to their income. We're launching the product this week. It’s the only ...

I do a lot of work with startups and hear a variation of this surprisingly often: “We’ve budgeted very little for marketing because our product’s gonna sell itself.” I’m always taken aback. And it’s signified a complacency that’s ultimately proved commercially fatal every time. Of course, entrepreneurs need bucket loads of vision and self-belief to get a new venture off the ground and keep pushing forward. And, if a product is truly ...

The recently-published white paper – Planning for the Future – sets out the government’s plans to overhaul town planning, with implications for how local councils and property developers will need to consult communities.

There’s a strong emphasis on the need for local authorities “radically and profoundly to re-invent the ambition, depth and breadth with which they engage communities as they consult on Local Plans,” giving them “an earlier ...

This article, ‘Thinking Big Matters in Marketing’ by LinkedIn’s Keith Browning, argues the bigger your company is, the more successful it will become … and so on in a virtuous circle. Browning sets out a robust case and attempts to explain it. Big businesses grow faster because their products or services are more available and they're more likely to spring ...

I’ve just read this shocking account of how New York's Bronx Zoo exhibited a kidnapped African boy in a monkey cage in 1906 – and spent 114 years denying its wrong doing. It’s a stark example of doing the wrong thing in a crisis – exacerbating reputational damage by denying the undeniable instead of taking responsibility. It’s finally taken the Black Lives Matter movement to prompt ...

“I thought I'd just ignore it,” he told me. There are many cases where I’m sure this is absolutely the best policy. Junk mail. A minor insect bite. An insult from someone you don’t care about. But an approach from an investigative BBC journalist isn’t one of them. I was a bit surprised the other day when I first got the call the other day to ...