Grab your coffee, greet your colleagues and peers, and gear up for a day packed with energy, ideas, and connections!

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A warm welcome to all delegates, followed by a brief summary of the day's main topics.

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Whether you are navigating internal pressure to cut costs or striving to elevate the profile of your communications function, this session provides the "how-to" for framing PR as a fundamental driver of business success. Walk away with actionable ideas on how to  bridge the gap between PR outputs and business outcomes. 

Learn how to prove tangible business impact to leadership and the C-suite by translating communication data into strategic business value.

Talking points 

• Beyond Vanity Metrics: Moving beyond vanity metrics to translate PR data into CFO-friendly insights such as ROI, lifetime customer value and lead generation.
• Boardroom Advocacy: Practical frameworks for presenting the case for PR investment at the director and board level. Learn how to translate communication metrics into the language of business strategy, helping you secure budgets and demonstrate the value of your work.
• Integrated Measurement: Integrating PR measurement directly into marketing funnels to demonstrate tangible business impact
• Justifying PR Budgets: From "Nice-to-Have" to "Need-to-Have": Justifying PR budgets by quantifying reputation management and long-term brand equity.
• Rigorous Accountability: Accountability as an Asset: Shifting from "blunt instrument" reporting to rigorous, outcome-based communication analysis.

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In a landscape defined by geopolitical pressure and declining institutional trust, the role of communications has shifted from simple brand promotion to essential reputation management. Traditional metrics—which rely on volume, reach, and output—fail to capture the true strategic value of PR when the external environment is increasingly volatile. 

This session explores how communications leaders can build measurement frameworks that reflect real business outcomes, strengthen organisational resilience and ensure communications remains a strategic driver of organisational success.

• Strategic Alignment: Aligning communications activity with broader corporate strategy - translating reputation into measurable business value for the C-suite.
• Measuring in Flux: Strategies for measuring and protecting reputation in an era of geopolitical pressure and declining trust.
• Quantifying Stability: Developing measurement approaches that capture the value of communications in managing uncertainty, maintaining stakeholder confidence and supporting organisational agility.
• Beyond Volume: Moving beyond volume metrics to embed data, insight and evaluation at the heart of communications—demonstrating how reputation drives business performance, corporate responsibility and long-term organisational value.
  

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Please help yourself to refreshments and network with our event partners and industry peers.

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In this session you will hear from industry leaders on how to break down silos between PR, social, and marketing to build a unified framework for impact measurement that provides a consistent narrative for the business.

From establishing a unified KPI architecture and integrating technology to creating a single business narrative and structured feedback loops.  Find out how not only  to ensure consistent messaging and coordinated impact measurement from day one, but also to  present a unified story to the C-suite that connects communication activities to tangible financial results.

• Unified KPI Architecture: What standardised performance metrics to use across departments to ensure PR, social, and marketing are all measuring against the same business objectives, such as pipeline contribution or lifetime customer value, rather than isolated functional metrics.
• Integrated Data Ecosystem: Creating a single source of truth - connecting PR monitoring tools with social listening platforms and marketing automation systems.
• Proactive Collaborative Planning: How to implement collaborative planning and shift from reactive communication to proactive alignment by involving PR, social, and marketing teams at the inception of every campaign strategy.
• Shared Analytics Dashboards: Developing shared dashboards that synthesize PR sentiment, social engagement, and marketing conversion data.
• Structured Feedback Loops: Creating structured feedback loops to turn communication into a two-way learning process.
  

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Public relations has spent decades chasing a seat at the table, with measurement often sold as the ultimate enabler. But is it actually doing the job? Drawing on extensive doctoral research from Leeds Beckett University—including a comprehensive study of 500 UK practitioners and deep-dive interviews with practitioner-manager pairs—Stephen Waddington challenges the status quo.

While measurement is the primary gateway to recognition, it is the one area where high-performing communications teams consistently rate themselves poorly. Stephen argues that the barrier to excellence is not a lack of data, but a failure of interpretation. This session moves beyond the "supply of metrics" debate to explore how leaders can transform raw data into the tangible, memorable evidence that boards actually govern by.

Key Takeaways:

• The Interpretation Shift: Learn how to stop being an "evidence producer" and start acting as a strategic interpreter, translating communication data into the language of the boardroom.
• Governing by Evidence: Understand the distinction between activity reporting and the high-level insights required to drive governance and decision-making at the C-suite level.
• Recognition as Management Work: Practical frameworks for demonstrating that your function is doing the work of management, not just the work of media relations.
• Navigating Organisational Dynamics: A vital caution on how professional standing is built on relationships and why recognition must be actively re-earned when leadership changes.
  

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Enjoy a lunch that’s designed to break the ice and broaden your professional circle.

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In a cynical macroeconomic climate, "vanity metrics" won't save your budget or your headcount. To survive in the boardroom, communications leaders must translate media buzz into business value. Join Lucy Cafferkey, Head of Media Relations at Starling, for a candid, behind-the-scenes look at measuring communication in a complex, digital-first landscape.

Using a Starling Bank consumer case study, Lucy will deconstruct exactly how earned media directly commanded digital traffic and fueled business growth. Move past retroactive reporting and learn how to engineer measurement directly into your creative concepts, ensuring results-driven PR is the default output every single time.

Talking points:

• Speaking the C-suite’s Language: Strategies for justifying budget and manpower by aligning PR activities with business-critical outcomes.
• Proving the value of earned media: Helping PRs think about the return on investment from earned media and how to demonstrate the impact to the business
• The Integration Imperative: Why PR must bridge the gap with social and marketing funnels to track conversion and provide a unified narrative of impact.
  

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Please help yourself to refreshments and network with our event partners and industry peers.

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In the high-stakes environment of retail, PR can easily be dismissed as a volume-driven activity—measured by column inches rather than customer outcomes. But for Communications leaders, the pressure to prove business value has never been higher. Join Natalie Simpson, Head of Consumer PR, Social and Influencer at Asda, as she pulls back the curtain on how to transform the consumer PR function from an output-focused team into a strategic business driver.

Key Takeaways:

• The "So What?" Framework: Learn how to pivot your reporting from volume and reach to metrics that actually matter to the C-suite, such as conversion rates, share of voice, and brand sentiment.
• Case Studies in Conversion: A deep dive into successful campaigns—including Asda’s red basket Valentine’s Day- demonstrating how PR can be directly mapped to tangible business impact rather than abstract awareness.
• AI as an Addition, Not a Replacement: A practical approach to integrating AI into the PR toolkit to target journalists and streamline workflows, while maintaining the human-centric storytelling that drives genuine engagement.
  

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The communications landscape is undergoing a structural reset. Communications leaders are now managing brands within a fragmented ecosystem defined not just by technological disruption, but by escalating geopolitical instability, a collapse in institutional trust, and the rise of the machine as a primary information gatekeeper. 

This session explores the collision of these trends, addressing how to maintain brand authority when traditional metrics fail to capture value in this volatile environment. We will demystify "Generative Engine Optimization" (GEO) as a critical component of a broader, integrated strategy, moving beyond the hype to examine how AI interacts with your brand's reputation across social, search, and corporate channels. 

Join us to learn how to build "credibility signals" that survive both human skepticism and algorithmic gatekeeping.

Talking points:

• The AI & GEO Context: Move beyond traditional SEO to understand how LLMs and Generative Engines act as the new gatekeepers of your brand, and why AI-generated "citations" are the emerging benchmark for earned media authority.
• Quantifying Trust in a Volatile World: Explore strategies for measuring brand stability amidst geopolitical pressure, ensuring that your reputation metrics remain resilient when the news cycle turns hostile.
• Integrated Measurement as the New Standard: Learn how to break down the silos between PR, social, and marketing to build a unified framework that feeds into the C-suite’s focus on lead generation, conversion, and customer lifetime value.
• Building Algorithmic Authority: Practical frameworks for influencing the "Black Box"—leveraging high-trust earned media and strategic messaging to ensure your brand remains the source of truth for both humans and AI models alike.
  

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