Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the team at High-Rise!

It’s that time of year again, where the nights draw in, the temperature drops and one reflects on where the year went…

This year, High-Rise has a lot to be proud of. We received a Silver Award in the PRMoment 2021 awards for Best Community Engagement. This was for working with Ashgate Hospice, one of our lovely clients, and helping them campaign for vital funding. It speaks to a bigger picture here too, where the community rally behind the cause. The determination from the public to ensure their local hospice could continue providing its invaluable service was heartwarming and a privilege to be a part of.

We also ran another of our clients’ Charity Giving Event, where Box Power, the UK’s only philanthropic energy consultancy, gave away £800,000 to 24  charitable causes across the North West. This included hospices and charities helping those living with disabilities. The cherry on top of the cake was each applicant receiving double the amount they’d applied for! What a statement from Box Power – showing that consultancy can have a conscience.

Before you get exhausted at our excessive trumpet blowing, one more thing! High-Rise assisted our green pensions and investment client, Path Financial, in its entry to Sky’s Zero Footprint Fund. The fund was created to amplify the voice of initiatives with a positive impact on the planet and, with our support, Path was awarded £250,000 inadvertising with their media outlet. 

All this is without even mentioning the growth that High-Rise has undergone this year, with  the wonderful Sarah Tulley, joining us in June as an Account Manager. 

Looking ahead to the new year, the High-Rise team have aspirations and goals from not just a personal standpoint (we’ll get to that later), but goals for our work and what we hope the new year will look like for us. Helen, our lovely Managing Director, has penned a few aspirations…

• More going to see clients and in-person meetings post Omicron! As much as Zooms are efficient and help us to be more productive, I’d love for the team to get out and about more to meet our clients and see their work. It gives us a more rounded understanding of our client’s work which means we can do a better job supporting their communications. This is all post-Omicron of course. Maybe we’ll even get to have our cancelled Christmas party!

• Launching our new brand identity and website. We’ve had a kind of ‘soft launch’ but not really announced our new brand and website yet, basically because we’re still tinkering with it! But we will be out and proud, in the New Year – and we really love our bold new look!

• B-Corp! This is a big one for us for the New Year and will be a lot of work. But if we’re serious about working with purposeful clients then our business model needs to reflect that. One of our clients Path Financial is further down the road to B-Corp than we are which has given us a good insight into what’s involved and why it’s worth doing.

And On a more personal note, as we head into the new year, the High-Rise team have had to think about resolutions…

Laura, one of our Account Managers says she’ll employ her green thumb and grow more of her own veg as well as getting on the dreaded Peloton twice a week (or else that lockdown investment has been for nothing!). Helen, our Managing Director has set her hopes high, aiming to do more exercise, less doom-scrolling and finally, be inspired and zoom out to the bigger picture. She’s currently in love with a Bodyform advert which captures some of the energy she wants us to bring to our work. She loves how it takes a big picture view and celebrates life in all its hopes and joyous moments and absolutely gutting times too. And adds that the music is great. 

Meanwhile I’m left pondering what’s actually achievable this year after my completely failed attempt at ‘one-second-a-day’ , an app that lets you upload one second videos every day of the year… I think I bailed out around March. So the conclusion I’ve come to is to start daily acts of kindness, just something small each day to try and make someone’s day a little easier. I know that sounds very cliche but it takes 60 days to form a habit and I’m hoping that by the end of the year it just becomes second nature! 

We’ll see how all these go!

All that remains is to wish every one of our clients, friends and family a merry (and safe!) Christmas, surrounded by those you love, and the happiest of New Years. Our offices are closed from today, until the 4th January. See you in 2022!