With a decade of consulting experience on top of a 25 year career in the media, Kathryn Kiefer built an impressive list of situations where her help has enabled an organization to achieve its communications objectives. Here are a few recent case studies that provide an overview of what Kathryn delivers to clients. Click on a specific item to read the case study, or click here to read all of them.
• Turning Crisis Into Opportunity. A high tech company located in a community with strong ties to the military terminated an employee for poor job performance. The employee sued, claiming he was fired because he was an Army reservist at a time when it was possible the employee’s reservist unit would be called up and sent to Iraq. The company was slow to react to the former employee’s aggressive approaches to the media. As a result, local and regional reporters wrote articles antagonistic to the company. Its reputation as a good employer was in danger of being damaged, its stature in its home town and with the military -- an important customer -- threatened, and it had a growing concern about the inaccurate reporting spreading to other areas where the company had customers and other stakeholders. Click here to read this case study.
• Turning A Good Speaker Into A Great Communicator. The head of a new consulting firm decided the most effective way to build the business would be to deliver speeches at meetings of professional and trade associations whose members were in industries where he would most likely find new clients. He knew he had decent public speaking skills, having done it at previous jobs, but also knew that he needed help learning how to structure and deliver his talks in a way that truly engaged the audience, making people want to discuss their business issues with his firm so he could show ways in which his company could help. Click here to read this case study
• A Strategic Approach To Media Relations And Client Communications. Develop and implement a media relations, community involvement and client communications strategy to raise the firm's profile and differentiate itself from competitors as part of developing the firm's new national marketing plan. The need was created by new market research which revealed that, despite being the world's oldest and largest benefits consulting firm, not even its own clients could articulate what made our client different or better than its competitors; potential clients saw the field as filled with largely interchangeable service providers. To maintain market share, fees, and profit margins, the firm's senior management needed to look beyond traditional answers to find non-traditional solutions. Click here to read this case study.
• Redefining Delivery Of Women’s Health Care. Local medical centers claimed to deliver “one stop medicine” for women's healthcare. But in reality, patients had to march from one building to another, and from one treatment or diagnostic center to another and then wait for reports before follow-up appointments could be scheduled. All of this affected the quality of care. Our client said it would build a genuine, single facility for the examination, diagnosis, treatment and recovery of women's healthcare issues that would be unique to the area. The problem was to differentiate the proposed facility from what other organizations claimed inaccurately they already offered as our client went to the news media to build public support, and to the state for approval of a Certificate of Need. Click here to read this case study.
• Turning Chaos Into Communications Victory. Our client, a clearing house for a wide range of information about organ donation, was starting to receive negative media coverage because calls from the public and reporters seeking information were not being returned promptly, or the wrong person returned the call, or the information given was not what the caller wanted or needed. So, for the first time in its history, the organization was being treated with hostility by reporters, and there was a risk that public would be turned off to organ donation in spite of community programs run by our client to encourage doing so. Click here to read this case study.
• Strong Lawyers Into Good Communicators. A large, one-office law firm in a major financial and business center had more than its share of top lawyers, handling complex transactions, financings, litigation and other legal matters for small and mid-sized clients in a range of sectors and industries. But it had difficulty competing for work from top tier companies and institutions. The firm hired a new marketing director with international credits and successes in the field. His marketing plan envisioned an opportunity to outflank competing, larger law firms by adopting a totally new client communications strategy, which included a higher profile in the city's ample print and broadcast business news media. Click here to read this case study.
For detailed information on the case studies, or to discuss your organization’s communications needs, please contact us.