Elli Moody is Director of Policy and Adovacy at CPRE, the Campaign to Protect Rural England. She was previously Director of Extrernal Affairs at the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, and Head of Corporate Communications and External Affairs at Girl Guiding.
We’ve worked with Elli and her team on various campaign concepting, funder engagement and advisory projects over the past few years.
Tom: How did you find out about us?
Elli: I’d started a new job, saw the task in front of me, and thought I’d like to get some consultancy help. I looked around, and I must have just Googled you and signed up to your newsletter.
What I loved was the offer of a 15-minute call with the CEO. It forces you to engage, and it made me feel like you wanted to talk to us. It probably takes up a lot of your time, but it’s a brilliant marketing tool. And it worked.
The first thing we hired you for was the training. It set a really high baseline internally in the sense of ‘here’s what an external organisation feels like is the norm now.’ Consultancies work with loads of organisations, so there is a certain credibility if you say something; it’s not the same as someone internally saying the same thing.
Those sessions helped change our working culture. People have thought differently about things after that, and there are materials and tools that you can constantly bring back in. It hasn’t all been plain sailing, but it really, really helped.
Tom: What’s it like to work with us?
Elli: Your team are all approachable, and we get your time too. That feels good, because in other agencies you get the CEO at the start and then you never see them again.
The team come across as incredibly thoughtful, you listen really well, and then you ask the difficult questions, or the questions we maybe haven’t thought of. It shows you’re listening, and that you haven’t brought your own agenda or a set of questions you ask everyone.
You’re quick to respond, accessible, open, and expert. Everybody on our side who’s worked with you, with Natallia and Jamie, really respects what you say. It’s not ‘oh, the agency said it’, it’s ‘that was useful, that was interesting.’ And it’s been fun.
Tom: What could we do better?
Elli: Working with you has helped us have better conversations in our own team. The more people who have contact with you, the better, because then they’ve got the reference point as well, not just me.
My ask of you would be to do more of the conversations that help new ideas land. With the solar work, some people in the team were sceptical and just went, ‘that’s not right’. But when they had the opportunity to speak with Jamie, they got under the skin of it, because someone was there and they had to engage. It really helps the person who’s commissioned it not to be the only one bringing that work back in.
Tom: How would you describe what we actually do?
Elli: It feels like you’ve got a niche in the brand and policy communication space. By that I mean fully understanding and being embedded in brand, marketing and digital, and how they can be used to influence policy change.
What I’d recommend people come to you for is a really sophisticated understanding of how brand can help you deliver your policy influencing work, not just your marketing comms. Definitely come for the strategic advisory and the campaign-strategy work: new ways of thinking, seeing things differently from the perspective of how an organisation that’s working with a diversity of clients sees them… a strategic, external, politically astute view: here’s how you could cut through, here’s how you could really make a difference.
Tom: What advice would you give to someone thinking about working with us?
Elli: Be prepared to be all in, because they will want to connect with you and they’ll have more ideas than you can manage. You’ve got to engage with it and take what you can. Be prepared to have your thinking turned on its head. And be prepared to get to know them, because they will want to know the individual people they’re working with, and they will want to understand where the organisation’s going.
You will have brilliant conversations with them around your stuff and aside from your stuff. The dinners they run are excellent. There is so much insight in the Cast from Clay team: you should be trying to extract as much of it as you can. Cast from Clay have added so much value to us, all of you, beyond the actual projects.
It can be quite perfunctory with agencies–they get your mission, and then it doesn’t really matter which people they are talking to internally. With Cast from Clay, it feels like you talk about us, and then come to us with a coordinated view. It feels like you pay attention. It feels like we’re important.
If you want to read another review, the next is with Rowan Emslie, Chief Communications Officer at the Centre for Future Generationns. If you would like to have an initial conversation with Tom, our CEO, to discuss a potential engagement, you can book a 15 minute call.