Writing for business clients is very different to journalism. Many of
the skills are the same, but I've worked with some great business
journalists who would make terrible corporate writers. I like to think
I'm good at both; I certainly enjoy both. A few examples:
Ending child cruelty
I worked with children's charity the NSPCC's on their wonderfully ambitious Full Stop Campaign. Their aim was to end cruelty to children in the U.K and – to help achieve that – raise the biggest amount of money ever attempted in the U.K: £250m. My job was to turn a mass of strategy papers into a hard hitting and persuasive document that would convince major donors to support the campaign. Full Stop won several awards for the charity, and the NSPCC managed to smash its fundraising target
A better deal from lawyers
Lawyers are not the most popular professionals. Their habit of charging by the hour doesn't help. I worked with the legal association C&I Group to research and write a report that looked at other ways for law firms to bill their clients. Rather than giving lawyers a kicking for their billing habits, the brief was to write something that would provoke a constructive debate about the topic. The report, Stop the Clock, did just that, gaining lots of positive publicity along the way for BDO Stoy Hayward, the accountancy firm that sponsored the project. A note: I often work as part of a team put together by a PR or communications agency, and this project is a good example of that. The agency was Grist, a very nice bunch of people.
Lessons from the crisis
The financial crisis has kept me very busy, writing about both its impact and causes. Ernst & Young, the global accounting firm, asked me to write and research a report that looked at how entrepreneurial companies around the world were responding to the crisis, and what lessons they were learning along the way. Lessons from change: Future market leaders, was a fun assignment, and one that was personally significant - it meant that I'd written something for each of the Big Four global accounting firms.
