Brands2Life and PR Week have been running the UK Communications Directors Survey together for six years. When we started the survey, Communications Directors made it clear that their role was increasingly strategic to the business but they were paying the price in terms of hours worked and pressures on their team. The closer relationship with the board has given Directors an earlier opportunity to deliver the comms perspective. Partly as a consequence of this closeness, the breadth of Comms Directors' challenges and responsibilities has become even wider.
The stature and responsibilities of the Communications Director have continued to grow during the six years we have run the survey.
This year, for the first time, we asked who Comms Directors approached for ideas.
Unsurprisingly the rapid growth of digital and social media has made the single biggest impact on the Comms Director role.
The survey suggests that everyone is spending more time (if not money) on metrics and a far wider range of metrics are being used than when the survey started.