Work It! How Comms Workshops Build Great PR Strategies & Strong Client Relationships 

By Paul Beadle, Frontier Public Relations

In an industry that has become dependent on virtual meetings and AI tools that capture minutes and summarise actions, to the point that you don’t even have to attend, I am still a massive advocate of a communications workshop.

In fact, if you’ve not done one in a while or have never had one, I urge you to start organising a workshop with your client, agency or comms and marketing teams now.

You don’t even have to call it a workshop if that sounds too 1980s for you. Call it a brainstorm, a discovery session, or a synch up. Call it what you like but just get all your key stakeholders in a room for a couple of hours and start strengthening your relationships.

After all, no matter how many layers of technology we put in front of each other, human interaction is still at the heart of what we do – communicate.

We recently held a workshop for a new client with attendees coming from Europe and the UK. For our senior client choosing Frontier PR was a significant investment in time, budget, energy and trust, so we thought it was vital that we should all meet face to face and, not only build the PR plan together, but also understand how each other ticked.

You can’t do that over Teams. You need to be away from the potential distraction of dodgy WiFi, Amazon deliveries and the temptation to check your email while somebody else is talking.

And that brings me to another fundamental element of a good and successful communications workshop – structure and discipline. If busy people are going to give up a few hours of their time, you need to ensure they remain engaged throughout and can appreciate the value of their attendance and the end result.

You want people to leave the event feeling energised and excited by the communications strategy.

So here are a few suggestions for ensuring your communications workshop is a success:

Purpose: Have a clear end goal and agreed output, whether it’s a whole new PR strategy or a plan to deal with a thorny comms issue. That way everyone remains focused on the purpose and end goal and won’t become distracted by side issues.

A timed agenda: Agree an agenda with timescales for each point and have a facilitator to capture key points, move the discussion on and ensure everyone gets a say.

Icebreaker: This helps loosen the vocal chords and blow the cobwebs away from the grey matter and is a great way of contributors introducing themselves and their personality without making its sound like a LinkedIn profile.

Personally, I like to keep the icebreaker aligned to the purpose of the workshop, but with enough latitude to ensure attendees don’t just repeat the company line. For example, “what brand do you love, and what could the client learn from it?”

Housekeeping: Meeting etiquette has become increasingly relaxed over the many years that I have been working, and while I’m not proposing we all go back to wearing business attire while sitting in a funky co-working space sipping a chai latte, it should still mean putting your phone away and only using your laptop to take notes.

More to the point, keep the content and format of the Workshop so engaging that people want to be involved and not check their Google Alerts. But of course, build in enough comfort breaks to allow people to keep on top of work events.

Move! To make a workshop engaging, you need to engage people, so break out the flip charts, yellow sticky notes, coloured markers and Blu-Tack. Ask people to write down their thoughts, vote for the things they think are important and stick the output to the walls, creating a buzzy and collaborative atmosphere.

I once papered a couple of walls of a major bank’s meeting room in Canary Wharf with notes that eventually became a successful PR campaign that generated huge amounts of coverage and helped reverse the negative perception of one of their important services. The client loved the workshop, although maintenance less so as we left finger marks on the glass walls.

When the workshop is complete, the output collated and the comms strategy developed, you can return to the standard format of meetings – whether online or in-person – to oversee the delivery of the agreed activity. But the workshop will always act as a reference point for the process of developing that strategy and the time you all spent together dreaming it up.

And you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how often your client says: “we must do that again.”

Because a good communications workshop is as much about ensuring good communications between PR consultant and client, as it is about communicating the business objectives of the company.

A blog by Paul Beadle, Frontier Public Relations

Thursday, 11th September 2025

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