By Lauren Tye, Telford & Wrekin Council
There’s a particular feeling that comes from walking into a conference room you’ve been in four times before and actually knowing people. Not just nodding-vaguely-familiar knowing, but proper knowing – who takes their coffee how, who’s just gone through a restructure, who you can grab during the break and say “actually, can I pick your brains about something” and mean it.
That’s where I found myself at LGcomms Academy in Nottingham this year, sitting at the halfway point of the Future Leaders programme. And if I’m honest, it didn’t feel like halfway. It felt like something bigger was starting.
A year’s worth of learning, compressed into two days.
If you’ve never been to Academy, it’s hard to explain just how much gets packed in. Two days, a programme stacked with speakers, and somehow every single one of them telling you something that’s been quietly keeping comms teams up at night for the last twelve months – except now it’s out in the open, being picked apart, and you realise you weren’t the only one wrestling with it.
We had talks on inspiring change in politics – on how comms isn’t just the messenger anymore, but increasingly the thing that helps shape what gets decided in the first place. We talked about reaching the audiences we’ve always struggled to reach, the ones who don’t read council newsletters or follow us on social, and what it takes to meet people where they are, rather than where it’s easiest for us to be.
And, inevitably, we talked about AI. Not in the breathless “this changes everything” way that’s become exhausting, but in a much more useful way – comms professionals genuinely sharing how the tools we were told would take our jobs are, for now at least, doing the unglamorous heavy lifting that frees us up to do the bit that actually needs a human: judgement, tone, knowing your community, knowing when something’s about to go wrong before it does.
Which brings me to the bit I keep coming back to.
We already do the sense-checking. We just don’t say so.
A theme that kept surfacing across sessions – sometimes directly, sometimes just underneath what people were saying – was this: local government comms teams have quietly become the sense-checkers of the organisation. We’re the ones asking, “is this clear,” “is this kind,” “is this going to land the way we think it will,” “have we actually said what we mean.” We do this instinctively, on every press release, every campaign, every difficult line in every difficult report.
But we don’t talk about it like that. We talk about ourselves as the people who write the words and design the posters, when we’re holding something much more strategic: an organisation-wide quality check on how things are said before they go out into the world. If anything, that’s the case this Academy made loudest to me – that the future of this profession isn’t just sharper tools or smarter audience targeting, it’s us being far more deliberate about naming what we already do. We need to stop apologising for being “just comms” and start being upfront that we are, in effect, the strategic conscience of the organisation on how things land. That’s a repositioning job as much as anything else, and it starts with how confidently we talk about ourselves.
The bit that actually got me, though.
For all the brilliant content – and there was a lot of it – what Future Leaders has genuinely given me, four Academies in, is the people.
It’s easy to underestimate how much that matters until you’ve sat through enough of these to watch it happen. The first year, you’re introducing yourself to everyone. By the fourth, you’re walking into a room and there are five conversations already half-started that you can just slot straight back into. You know who’s working on what. You know who to text when something’s gone sideways back at your own authority and you need someone who actually gets it, not just someone who’s sympathetic.
Over dinner, Alix talked about the “LG family” at one point, and it’s one of those phrases that could sound a bit much if you said it out loud in any other context. But sat in that room in Nottingham, surrounded by people who’d shared a genuinely difficult year – politically, financially, in some cases personally – it landed exactly the way she meant it to. It really did feel like that. Not a network. Not a sector. Something closer to family, in the way that only comes from showing up, year after year, and choosing to keep showing up.
Onwards!
So here we are – halfway through Future Leaders, full of new ideas about AI, audiences, and how we sell ourselves better, and somehow more connected than I’ve ever been to this sector and the people in it.
I’m genuinely glad to have had the chance to be part of it this year, and I’m already looking forward to whatever next year’s Academy has in store. If the last few have taught me anything, it’s that the agenda is only half the reason to go.
The other half is the room.