By Sophie da Silva, Senior Communications Manager – Campaigns & Communications Planning, Wandsworth Council
The first-ever series of Zero to Hero training sessions, designed for budding comms professionals or anyone looking to refresh the basics, has come to an end.
Across nine sessions with 17 speakers, attendees were given a crash course in public sector communications.
With topics ranging from mastering political awareness to measurement and evaluation, using AI as a force for good to getting the most out of social media, each 45-minute webinar was crammed full of rich and high-quality content.
We heard all about the importance of maintaining a good relationship with council Leaders and some tips for doing this. We also discussed why it is essential to listen to the views of your employees when building internal comms campaigns and how to embed a creative mindset into your team. We debated the pros and cons of leaving X and the survival of the press release (spoiler alert: it’s not going anywhere yet!), and much more.
If you couldn’t attend, or as a reminder to those who did, we will be collating a training guide that brings together some key learnings to take away from each session to help you day-to-day if you need it.
It can be difficult in the context of strained budgets and bloated workloads to prioritise learning and development, but short bitesize webinars such as these prove that you don’t need expensive 9-5 training days.
We would love to deliver Zero to Hero again, potentially as an annual offer, to continue nurturing and growing new and emerging communications leaders.
To ensure we are listening to you, we have created a feedback survey to gather some insight to shape the future of this series. Please tell us what worked well, what you want to see more of, and what we could improve next time.
Even if you didn’t attend a session, we would also be really interested in what kind of learning or training you think we should consider for next time. Was there a topic you wished was included in the line-up? What challenges do you face in your role that would be a good fit?
Please take 10 minutes to complete the survey so we can make Zero to Hero even bigger and better!
As a final plea, most of the speakers for this series were sourced from within the industry. This meant they could bring both their knowledge and their own lived experience, which is invaluable. If you would be interested in running a session in the future, please get in touch. We would love to welcome some new voices!
If you attended any of the sessions, thank you for being part of it and giving up your time. We hope you found it useful.
As with all good superhero films, for now, we’ll leave you with this. Zero to Hero will return!