This June’s Communication Directors’ Forum on board the Arcadia will once again bring those with strategic responsibility for communications together with the service providers best positioned to help them. Neil Gibbons looks at what’s in store this year

Recovery ahoy! As the long-awaited economic upturn heaves into view on the horizon, communication directors are looking to allocate resources to new projects and seek innovative forms of stakeholder engagement.

Once again, many are drawing inspiration from the annual Communication Directors’ Forum – a threeday event at which comms practitioners take a step back from the daily grind and assess communications initiatives, review and research suppliers and extend their network of contacts.

This year’s CDF will be taking place on board the cruise ship Arcadia on 16-19 June, and once again it promises to be a hot house of networking and the very latest thinking.

Of course, for suppliers, it’s a golden opportunity to meet with senior decision-makers through prescheduled meetings – a speedy and cost-effective route to new business.

Unsurprisingly, many of them swear by the Communication Directors’ Forum. Integrated advertising agency Hunterlodge has been attending for six years and claims to have found over 15 new clients, generating in excess of £10 million in turnover.

“As an agency, we like to look at the bigger picture and discover what really keeps our clients awake at night,” says Hunterlodge marketing director Sally Hunter. “We work hard to understand their business needs and the CDF is an ideal place to have this conversation. It’s not about selling our services, but about opening up a dialogue.”

“We’re all wondering what 2010 will bring in terms of business stability and growth”

She says that, by taking both parties out of the traditional ‘meet and greet’ or pitch scenario, the CDF opens up the opportunity to discuss a much wider remit than a specific brief. “Key to a successful working relationship is the chemistry between both parties,” she says. “Clients on the CDF love the opportunity to talk to people about their business challenges not just hear a sales pitch. The format of the CDF gives us the informal setting to explore areas where we can add value as well as the opportunity to get to know each other.”

Branding and employee communications agency Marmalade Consulting expects this year’s forum to be particularly interesting.

“We’re all wondering what 2010 will bring in terms of business stability and growth,” says managing director Andréa Thompson, who’ll be there to stress the importance of communications skills in the change process and share Marmalade’s Advancing Communications Expertise interactive training modules – each covering an important communication skill in both face-to-face and e-Learning formats. “Am I an advocate of the CDF? Absolutely! This will be the seventh year I’ve attended and I think that speaks for itself. The Forum is simply the best way to win new business, generate contacts and it has paid for itself many, many times over.”

Business wins for Marmalade have included Deutsche Post DHL, Legal & General, Intec, Nationwide, Oxford Instruments and the NHS. It’s not all cosy chats and the pressing of flesh, though. Brendon Craigie, managing director of PR firm Hotwire UK, says that while he has come out of each event with great new clients, “The CDF is also an opportunity to debate key issues and trends within the communications industry. This often leads to some interesting and occasionally heated discussion.”

He’ll be there again this year to discuss Hotwire and its business and consumer PR services for the technology industry, along with representatives from Skywrite and 33 Digital, the latter to discuss the world of digital PR and marketing, as well as its strategic communications offering to brands looking to engage with digital communities.

Also attending this year’s event is employee engagement consultancy invigor8. There to promote what director Peter Gannon calls its “joined-up” approach to employee engagement, invirogr8 is a strong advocate of the event’s format.

“We like it very much,” says Gannon. “It is an incredibly efficient and cost effective way to meet 30 senior buyers and decision makers. Couple this with the efficient organisation and the great atmosphere on the ship, and we see it as a key part of our business development mix. We’ve met lots of new high level contacts and we have won some sizeable contracts.”

Richard Cobourne of communications company On Screen Productions agrees that that sociable atmosphere on stage is as important to the chemistry of the event as the pre-scheduled meetings.

He points to his introduction to Andrew Jeacock, the marketing director of KBR, at the 2008 forum. It was not at a scheduled meeting at all. He and fellow (non-competing) supplier, Belinda Lawson of PR agency Lawson Dodd had agreed to share a table at lunch and dinner. “More jolly and a better client experience to have a table of six during an intense three days,” Cobourne says.

Jeacock was actually a dinner guest of Belinda’s but was sat next to Richard. Despite an agreement not to talk shop over dinner, experiences were inevitably exchanged and Andrew and Richard ‘got on’. Five weeks on from the Forum they met again, this time to talk shop — six months later, contracts were signed to start working together.

Those service providers planning to attend for the first time this year will quite reasonably be asking whether the investment is genuinely worthwhile. Cobourne’s view? “There is not a scintilla of doubt that arranging this number of decent meetings with well-qualified prospects in any other way is simply not possible. But do not expect quick returns. We estimate that to turn a good meeting on the boat into real business takes six to 18 months.”