What we offer are extra skills, experience and brainpower to support clients’ own management, especially in areas such as Public Affairs, Corporate Responsibility, Employee Relations, Corporate Communications and other activities that affect reputation. We can provide a wide range of services: from management coaching, via project definition and partner identification, to planning and strategy development, plus benchmarking, training, interim management, executive search and more – not just in the UK but across Europe and beyond, through our international network of Associates.

Here are some examples:

• Knowing what key stakeholders think about you

If stakeholder perceptions don't match their expectations, reputation management activity can be at best fruitless and at worst damaging. Over the years we've conducted reviews of stakeholder opinion for numerous companies, for example in relation to their Social Reports. We're particularly successful in gaining access to leading public figures and opinion formers, as we demonstrated to a client which had previously met difficulties in obtaining access.

• Being equipped to respond to new challenges

Responding to reputational challenges may require change by the company itself. By applying our knowledge of business and of current best practice we help clients such as a leading regional utility to restructure their communications and put in place plans to meet needs arising from both external and internal developments. We frequently help clients to design or update their approach to external relations or corporate responsibility or community investment, including facilitating planning or strategy sessions, running task forces, or developing new initiatives such as partnership projects or employee volunteering programmes or award schemes.

• Making sense of corporate citizenship

It's becoming ever harder to keep up with developments in corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility (CSR): publications (including company Social Reports, government reports and EU White Papers), new standards and guidelines, conferences and seminars, journals, websites, press coverage, etc. Our face-to-face briefing and brainstorming service provides senior managers with regular analytical reviews of the latest developments, along with advice on their relevance to client companies. We can also facilitate strategy and planning sessions, run training for company staff, and provide assessments of what is going on in specific fields or geographical areas.

• Measuring performance against peer companies

We recently completed a fourth cycle of our Corporate Community Involvement (CCI) Index. This assesses participating companies' programmes against good practice and against their peers, and helps them identify ways of achieving greater effectiveness and value for money. The final report of our International Community Involvement Benchmark (in partnership with the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship) was published in 2002, and we are now working on plans for an exciting follow-on project to develop a Europen Executive Forum to promote and share good international practice in corporate citizenship.

• Getting the right people on board

For some years we have offered a specialised executive search service to recruit first-class individuals for corporate affairs and CSR positions. This is now complemented by an interim management service, which provides high-quality, experienced CSR and public affairs managers on limited-term contracts (typically from one month to one year) to put in place new functions, structures, strategies or initiatives, or simply to provide temporary management expertise while you look for the right individual to fill longer-term needs.