Amy Huntley, head of digital and communications at the Banking Standards Board, joins us to chat about the role of comms in building up a organisation on the 'burning platform' of the 2008 financial crisis. Read for her thoughtful perspective on starting out in comms and becoming successful.
Why did you choose to pursue a role in communications? For example, has it always been your passion or was it pure happenstance?
I certainly wasn’t savvy enough as a student studying English literature at university to know that communications was an area in which I wanted to work, let alone about all the myriad different roles that exist under the umbrella of communications. But I had always been oddly certain that I wanted to be an editor, which is what I trained to be and worked as for several years before I moved more into digital and comms more broadly. I’m now lucky enough to combine all three at the BSB.
What personal skills or attributes do you think are most important for a communications role? Why these skills/attributes in particular?
As an editor at heart I’m tempted to say an impeccable grasp of language and grammar, tone, and nuance. But those skills can be learned. In terms of personal attributes, I would say diplomacy! Working in communications often means working in the middle of your content producer and your audience. As good as the content may be in and of itself, the process of creating an engaging comms message for it is the task at hand, which can be misinterpreted as revision or criticism of the original product. The confidence to know and explain the difference between a successful piece of content and an effective communications message for that content is a valuable attribute.
What sort of challenges do you face in your role? Is there a particular challenge that you experienced in the past that stood out?
I joined the BSB back in 2015 when it was just a couple of months old. It was the first of its kind in the financial services sector, created from the ‘burning platform’ of the 2007/2008 financial crisis and there were no guarantees that it would succeed, so it was a bit of a leap of faith for the few of us who made up the entirety of the team in those early days. The challenge, from the communications perspective, was to create a brand from scratch, outline a clear remit, build up a body of work and some tangible outcomes and then to present that work in the public domain in a way that helped us build credibility quickly. We are coming up to our sixth anniversary this spring so I hope I can say we met that challenge.
How is the role of communications perceived in your organisation?
The BSB has grown a lot since 2015, but remains a small, tight-knit team and, before Covid at least, we all worked together in one office and tried hard to make sure that no team worked in a silo. In the comms team we spend at least as much of every day talking to others across the organisation as we do to each other, which is as it should be. So I hope that communications at the BSB is perceived as a collaboration, not something that goes on in ‘the cave’, which was how the comms team was referred to in one of my past roles.
What advice would you give to those at the start of their career in communications?
I think there is an assumption now that anyone starting out in communications will have their own fully formed personal brand and accompanying social media presence. Maybe that’s just me, because most of that was still in its infancy and very unsophisticated when I started out, and it didn’t feature in my career in a meaningful way for quite a long time. And of course all those channels are super important. But I think more fundamental than social media savvy is a love for language and words. Good discipline with the written word is a base skill that can be transferred to all aspects of a career in communications, from your own effective communication with colleagues to an ability to produce engaging written work, video content or messaging in any other medium, regardless of what social channels come and go in the future.
My only other piece of advice to anyone starting out would be to identify your champion. I was lucky enough to have a few champions, who taught me, gave me opportunities, and pushed me forward when sometimes I didn't have the confidence to do it for myself. I still regularly draw on their advice, and I try to pay it forward now, making sure I include junior colleagues in all aspects of projects, give them space to experiment and ask questions, and prioritise training.
What do you think the secret of success is when working in communications?
Diplomacy again, and brevity! I’ve mentioned the benefits of diplomacy in a comms role, but brevity is a check that should be applied to every piece of communication, but so rarely seems to be. Put simply, have you communicated your message in 1000 words where 100 would have been fine? The latter is almost always more effective and powerful.
We at React & Share live for helping communications teams through understanding website content sentiment and improving it off the back of feedback. How do you and your team approach content improvement?
This is a very live question for us at the BSB right now as we are developing a new website and brand, due to go live later this spring. In practical terms, for the comms team this means interrogating our SEO guidelines to match our messaging to the ways in which our work and its audience has evolved, creating, and testing new website wireframes to make our content as accessible as possible and overlaying it all with an engaging new design and brand identity that sees us into the future.
