ABOUT LIVINGSTON CONSULTING OF MAINE:
Specialists in effective communications, customer and constituent relations, strategic planning and revenue growth for businesses and nonprofit enterprises – more than 15 years experience working with some of the most innovative businesses in the country
The fact is that all sorts of enterprises, whether they be structured for profit, not for profit; traditional or non-traditional; everything from manufacturing to social services, healthcare to retail, hospitality to education share one common denominator, one thing that every organization, business or other enterprise requires, regardless of whether their role is to make a profit or not:
Everyone needs more money. We can help.
COMMUNICATIONS
We can serve as the interpreter between you and your audience. We can be sure that you talk to your various audiences – customers or clients, vendors, partners, media, public – in their own language.
Just as importantly, we can be sure that whatever means you use to communicate with audiences are consistent with one another, that the means whereby you communicate will reinforce the messages you’re trying to convey. We can also help you and your staff preserve that consistency by developing policies and style manuals that can help you make more effective use of all the communications tools at your disposal – including something as simple (and potentially devastating) as email. Ever send an email you wish you hadn’t? Ever get one that someone else would rather you hadn’t?
Have you given full consideration to the really vast array of communications devices available to you, which ones are most appropriate for various applications, and how best to use them? Here’s a partial list to help you get started:
· Simple correspondence (postal or “snail” mail)
· Website
· Advertising, including print, broadcast, Internet and others
· Public relations
· Press relations
· Meetings, conferences and conventions
· Special events
· Feature articles in consumer or trade publications
· Speeches
· Newsletters
· Internal communications, including such things as personnel or policy manuals
FACILITATING
A fresh, objective perspective is often the quickest and surest means toward progress. If you’re like most of us, you will tend to your core business or enterprise first – servicing clients, making the sale, doing whatever you are structured to do in the first place – long before you give much thought or attention to your own interests. Most of us are so deeply engaged in dealing with the myriad of trees that comprise our daily routines that we are thoroughly unable to see the forest.
That’s where an outside set of eyes and ears is most helpful, someone who has no stake in the outcome of your decisions whatsoever, but whose sole motivation is to help you make some meaningful decisions, ones you will implement and can live with; decisions that will enable you to pursue your mission most effectively and efficiently.
Livingston Consulting specializes in enabling such processes. We can facilitate meetings and conferences, internal planning processes, deliberations between potential partners – or potential adversaries. We function as a Professional Neutral, whose role in the process of corporate introspection is most expressly not to pass judgment. It is not to intercede between differing factions, at least not right away. It is simply to:
1. Serve as a conduit for unbiased observations, criticism and feedback; provide a buffer between the messenger and the emperor
2. Help recognize reality; to cut through differing viewpoints to determine consensus or to identify underlying truths
Your consultant shouldn’t care whether you are Robin Hood or robbin’ the ‘hood. He should care only that you recognize where you stand on that particular continuum.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
Who, exactly, is the public, and how would you like to relate to it?
That is actually a pretty sophisticated question, but yet one that is too seldom asked. Most of the time, there are multiple answers, in fact: multiple publics. In the largest sense, of course, the public is everyone you would like to be aware of who you are, what you do, and to feel positively toward you. But the global public includes lots of smaller groups – customers or clients, vendors, partners, all come to mind, as do, perhaps, regulators, legislators, competitors, and, not lastly, the media.
Most of the time, too, the segments of the public likeliest to pay attention to you already have some sort of impression of you, and before you start trying to leverage attention, you should have a good understanding of where you’re starting from.
And, let’s face it, attracting positive public impression is not all that easy, especially since everyone is trying to do so; and it gets harder the larger or broader the public you’re trying to reach. Still, if you have the right message to convey, and a carefully defined public to whom it should be conveyed, opportunities abound.
CHECK THE DETAILED LIST OF SERVICES FOR MORE IDEAS