SERVICES

Are your messages saying what you mean?

Do you know what messages you are sending to your clients, suppliers, stakeholders? Do your colleagues and staff know?

You want your messages to convey the ideas, concepts and meanings that you’ve worked so hard to distil. But you might be shocked to know what your messages are actually saying about your business.

WHM will analyse your current messages and review your communication strategy – to help you send the right messages out into the world.

Does your content resonate with the reader?

Can you imagine the world through your customer’s eyes? How about through the eyes of your staff? Colleague’s? Supplier’s? Or investor’s?

Can you communicate effectively with them all, in writing?

WHM can.

Speak their SEO language

Many people read the first few results on Google’s page 1, unaware they are paid ads. Therefore, to rank well in the organic listings, you need to use the key words and phrases that your client’s are searching for.

WHM can help you find the right words to rank better.

Are your values just window dressing?

It’s a well established fact supported by extensive research: values shape culture, and your culture is your brand.

After deciding which values you want to shape your business, how do you know if everyone has adopted them?

WHM will curate the stories your people tell which they feel exemplify a specific value in action. Sometimes they might confuse one value with another. But even if confused about which value applies, everyone wants to be heard. And you will know what areas need your attention.

The stories that are spot-on are pure gold. Build on them!

Are you telling your complex stories?

Data about the composition of the Southern Ocean were obtained from 1989–2014. Samples were repeatedly taken of the water column, from Hobart to Antarctica, using CSIRO’s ocean buoys to measure changing temperatures, currents and wind patterns. The samples were analysed in situ, and the results uploaded to ERS-1 [and later satellites], downloaded to TERSS [Tasmania Earth Resources Satellite Station] at Drouthy Point, then transmitted to CSIRO Oceanography, Hobart.

This critical data, obtained over 25 years, has contributed to our understanding and to the science of how Earth’s climate is changing; how rapidly it is changing; and the reasons why it is changing.

WHM’s principal wrote “Obscured By Clouds” to brief the [then] Premier of Tasmania, Robin Gray, seeking government support for the TERSS Project headed by CSIRO’s Division of Oceanography and the University of Tasmania, in Alliance with the European Union’s Space Agency. The Premier said 'Yes'.

What’s the story behind the story?

Many people have compelling back-stories to their professional life which often emerge as they recall the twists and turns their life has taken.

An attentive listener will notice a disjunction in the narrative that the narrator takes for granted, and ask: “Why did that happen?”, helping the fascinating details to emerge, resulting in a more comprehensive, coherent story.

WHM has a track record of listening acutely as someone talks about their life. We have a genuine desire to understand: how you got from there ... to here.

Do you use the S.T.O.P. Process?

The early years of commercial air travel were plagued with plane crashes, an appalling loss of life, and escalating financial disaster.

Vital knowledge gained in the investigations that followed each tragedy was often lost, because causal connections were not presented properly, nor indexed or curated. So key findings were often lost, ‘adrift in a river of detail’, as subsequent investigations were to establish.

The Ground Systems Group at Hughes Aircraft, Fullerton, in California put aside half a year to research and design the Sequential Thematic Organisation of Publications (STOP) process. It was published in January 1965.

WHM recommends the S.T.O.P. process be adopted to organise the content and presentation of reports. It’s simple, and effective.

Can you chart a path to success?

It’s true that successful advocacy might mean consulting Sun Tzü’s The Art of War more often than Stephen Pinker’s The Sense of Style.

All written communications produced to support any advocacy effort need to stay focused on the overarching objective. So strategy, street-smarts, style, tone and timing are as important as content, facts and figures.
All are key factors for success.

WHM likes to see the whites of their eyes: know your target!

Need help with editing?

We love editing.

Someone else has taken all the hard decisions and made the creative choices. But sometime, they try to say too much, too quickly: all in one gulp. They can lack effective punctuation. Or misuse a word. Or could communicate using fewer, but more targeted words. And sometime they use zombie nouns which lumber across the page. Ugh!

WHM believes competent editing is able to redeem most written communications.