#NORA Leadership Seminar 2023

NB: This is a closed event for #NORA corporate partners.

This interactive seminar will introduce a novel approach which helps leaders to evaluate, explain, and redesign the activities of communication units. The Communication Business Model (CBM) applies the well-known business model concept to our field. It helps to reflect on and develop answers to the question of how the communications function – and more specifically, a communication department – creates, delivers, and capture value for an organization. It helps to identify cost-cutting options and to allocate resources in the best way.

Implicitly, we can identify one or even more business models for communications in every organization. But they are rarely revealed and reflected upon, and often neither consistent nor appropriate. The CBM approach helps to analyze and outline the inputs (revenue model), throughput (operating model, i.e., management and execution processes), outputs (product/service model) and impacts (value creation model) of communications.

Pilots projects with more than 50 organizations in the Netherlands and Germany have shown that the approach can be easily understood and applied in practice. It supports leaders in stimulating their teams to reflect on current practices and future-proof their departments. It also helps to explain what communications is doing in a language that is understood by top management and other internal partners. As part of the approach, communicators are asked to explain their practices in terms of an "elevator pitch“, similar to what startups need to do when pitching their business models to investors.

The seminar will outline the approach and present examples that showcase its applicability in practice, including results from concrete organizational contexts that exhibit typical business models identified. Participants will a) learn to apply the model to their own departments, b) are invited to outline their department’s daily work in business model terms, and c) further develop and discuss their applications within a group of peers. This exercise helps to get a first impression of the approach. It shall also stimulate a peer-to-peer debate within the trusted group of #NORA corporate partners. Some might also be interested to use the approach in more detail in their organizations; this could be facilitated in individual follow-up projects.