Continue reading »]]> Kraft Foods, the world’s second largest food and drink company, markets popular brands in more than 150 countries. Kraft identified writing skills as an important tool and area of development for its communications teams in a number of countries across Europe and the Middle East, and brought them together for a custom-designed Pinnacle writing training session.

The session in Vienna ran over one and a half days, and was delivered by a highly experienced journalist and Pinnacle trainer. It covered a range of topics from news values and judgment through the principles and forms of PR writing to the practicalities of headlines and press releases. The format was practical and interactive, with plenty of exercises, individual coaching and critical feedback.

Continue reading »]]> B. Braun is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of medical equipment, with 30,000 employees in more than 50 countries. The company commissioned Pinnacle to design and deliver an interactive communication seminar as part of an annual communications team meeting, which brought together PR professionals from its offices all over the world.

The half-day session in Barcelona, Spain, began with a series of briefings, case study discussions and workshops on the principles, instruments and dynamics of public relations: its role in the marketing/communications mix, integrating brand communications, the latest tools and tactics, and developments in the global media landscape.

After the break, the second half was a practical PR writing workshop based on analyzing and deconstructing a weak press release and rebuilding it into a strong press release powerful enough to make the news.

Continue reading »]]> Pinnacle’s suite of specialised PR courses for the European Parliament shows our ability to design highly customized training for major international organizations, and deliver large programmes effectively.

The European Parliament sits at the heart of the world’s most complex challenge in political communications. Its 785 MEPs represent almost 500 million people speaking 23 languages in 27 countries, many of whom see Brussels as distant, irrelevant or worse. Yet the Parliament is among the world’s most powerful legislatures, and its decisions affect everyday life in fundamental ways.

This adds up to a mammoth challenge for the European Parliament’s Secretariat, whose job it is to communicate to citizens how the Parliament is working on their behalf.

Recognising the essential role of the media in this process, the Parliament launched a tender to train its communicators in specialized media skills. Pinnacle won.

Pinnacle’s solution

Pinnacle designed and delivered more than 50 days of training for more than 100 European Parliament staff whose role includes communicating with the public, in two languages (French and English), and over the course of more than a year.

The courses were closely tailored for the needs of European Parliament communicators, including many workshops and case studies designed around the situations and topics that they face in everyday work.

Three separate programmes were delivered:

Media training – principles and practicalities of giving effective interviews to TV, radio and print media, including simulated TV and print interviews.

Media relations – understanding the media landscape, how journalists work and think, news angles and news values, and putting it into practice in everyday media relations.

Web TV – how to create informative and interesting audiovisual packages for Web TV. This course included a step-by-step process from concepts and visuals to scripting and recording voice-overs.

Results

-    Course participants rated training on average more than 4.5 out of 5

Continue reading »]]> Since 2009, Pinnacle has worked on a number of donor-funded communication capacity building projects in the Balkans, Caucasus and former Soviet states including Bosnia, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Serbia. These programmes aim to help government officials to interact with the EU Institutions in Brussels and to communicate the benefits of EU ties to their local media.

Continue reading »]]> The European Commission finances a huge variety of projects that promote sustainable economic development. One of their challenges is to communicate the benefits of this taxpayer-funded work to citizens. The Pinnacle team in Brussels created a custom website and social media network as a collaboration and knowledge sharing platform. We provide free downloadable resources and fire up discussions on the group, which is used by nearly 400 communication managers from across the continent.

Continue reading »]]> From 2008-2010 a large Pinnacle consulting team worked with the government of a prominent country to build ground-up a nationwide communications strategy. This strategy transformed the government’s communication culture and galvanised more than 50 ministries and entities into communicating proactively with stakeholders. After the Prime Minister approved the strategy, Pinnacle seconded a multilingual team of consultants to transfer knowledge, support implementation, and develop integrated online and internal communication strategies.