The ABI (Association of British Insurers) represents the collective interests of the UK's insurance industry. It speaks out on issues of common interest, helps to inform and participate in debates on public policy issues, and also acts as an advocate for high standards of customer service in the insurance industry.

In 2005, the ABI needed to understand how it was perceived by some of the most important individuals from among its membership and also by other crucial influencers within Parliament, government departments, regulators, the media, other trade bodies and consumer interest groups. Echo Research conducted more than 40 qualitative in-depth interviews (face-to-face or by telephone), with chief executives, members of both Houses of Parliament, senior financial journalists and directors of other relevant organizations.

The research provided the ABI's Senior Management Team, including its new Director General, with a clear understanding of the progress that the organization has made in recent years and with the further action key stakeholders and others are now looking for. It helped to inform decision-making on strategic priorities for 2006 and is also feeding into a review of communications and member-relations work.

SWIFT is an industry-owned cooperative supplying secure financial communication services and interface software to over 7,000 financial institutions in 194 countries. It has come under increased competition from other suppliers of secure messaging service, particularly via the Internet, and needed to ensure that it was projecting a consistent set of brand values and traits to the outside world. SWIFT approached Echo with a brief to help it achieve consistency of communication messages.

In order to achieve this, there were three elements to the project:

1) In-depth interviews with top management.
2) Desk research of key publications produced by SWIFT.
3) Workshops with key communicators.

Based on our research, SWIFT started to review its key messages, as part of a wider strategic overview of its position in the financial communication marketplace. As a result, there is now heightened awareness and greater consistency is being achieved across all communication channels, from visual identity through to web and print.

A leading global marketing information company, ACNielsen turned to Echo when it launched its wide-ranging business improvement program in Europe.
As reported by Rosie Halfhead, formerly Director of Communications, ACNielsen Europe, t he transformation was all-encompassing, bringing together 18 different businesses, each with their own product and service offerings, P&L accountability, production platforms and organizational models. The goal was to deliver a completely different business model and a radically different and improved experience for clients. Among other things, it called for changing the skills and behaviors of over 1,000 client-facing specialists. Clearly there was a role for communications to play - not least because the 18 countries affected represented 14 different languages.

The first and newly appointed full-time Director of Communications assessed the existing communications environment in order to understand current capabilities and the future requirements. Given the analytic culture of the organization, this needed to be tackled in a rigorous, systematic and structured way. Echo was appointed to train and equip its local managers to conduct face-to-face interviews to engage the business leaders in a discussion about business and communication, and to encourage the communications team members to talk about the business and to be more visible in general. The outputs were designed to help define the priorities for the way forward.

Over 100 interviews took place within a 4-week period. In many cases, this was the first time the local communications people had engaged their leaders in a discussion about the business. Many senior managers suggested that other 'staff' functions should take such a direct and fresh approach to understanding and focusing on the needs of the business.

The completed interview guides were returned to Echo, in a range of local languages, and the results were translated, analyzed and synthesized. This ensured an objective view of the findings that were then presented back to Europe's top team. All those interviewed also received a summary of the findings to avoid the classic 'black hole' syndrome that so often occurs when organizations fail to feed back outputs from assessments and surveys.

Special cross-functional and multi-country work teams were created to address and manage the outcomes at all levels. The outputs were clear: A radically different business model required a radically different approach to communication - one that informed, involved, inspired and influenced. This framework is now coming to life throughout the organization. It provides the essential basis from which to drive all the critical communications efforts with employees and clients.

There is no doubt that the initial groundwork through research, influence and impact-based actions has contributed significant value to the business. The mandate to change was received.