With homelessness on the rise and a government effecting unprecedented change in housing, the director of communications, policy and campaigns for Shelter has her work cut out. But Kay Boycott is determined to take a proactive approach. Neil Gibbons reports

Photographs by Sam Friedrich  

“Do I enjoy my job?” muses Kay Boycott, director of communications, policy and campaigns for housing and homelessness charity Shelter, as if considering the question for the first time ever. “I think after all the changes we’ve experienced this year, I doubt you’d find many in the charity sector who’d use the word ‘enjoy’. It’s just been so busy. These are some of the largest and fastest reforms introduced by any government in decades. So leading the communications response for a charity like ours has been incredibly interesting and exciting, but exhausting. Professionally, it’s been a fantastic year but I look around my team and see people looking forward to Christmas, put it that way.”

It’s 23 December and, in the guts of another bout of truly horrendous weather, the prospect of homelessness at Christmas s a genuinely sobering thought. For Kay Boycott and Shelter, helping people avoid this plight is a challenge made more acute by a period of economic gloom and the drastic reforms of the coalition government. You can see why she’d avoid the word ‘enjoy’.

But the zeal with which she approaches her wide-ranging role – overseeing a staff of almost 60 across research, public affairs, campaign, media, web, brand and marketing, and creative teams – is palpable. “I’m responsible for the total external presentation of Shelter,” she says. “With a cross-divisional role, I’m sometime talking to different audiences, sometimes the same audiences. But I try to bring it altogether.”

The public perception of Shelter often starts and finishes at the image of a rough sleeper. But, Kay explains, Shelter deals with housing in its broadest sense, including advice on eviction and repossession, housing benefit, tenancy problems, and even housing-related family and relationship issues. It’s a hefty remit. “But I worked a consultant before joining Shelter, so I was used to getting to grips with different industries. The expectation was always that you’d be able to walk into a given situation and hit the ground running. And I still believe if you have the skills, they are transferable – knowledge can be acquired more easily than skills. Having said that, housing and homeslessness has been one of hardest areas I’ve ever encountered. There’s just so much of it. I sometimes think pharmaceuticals looks easier than this.”

Kay is keen to flag up Shelter’s function as an advice service. Shelter’s advisers, for example, regularly go to court to help people avoid having their homes repossessed. “In fact, the advice service is how we help most people. We’re doing a lot more to promote that, and encouraging people to seek early advice.”

However, it’s still a time of flux. “There’s so much change coming from the government,” she says. “And it’s all inter-related: changes to local government funding, to housing benefit, to investment in social housing. The analogy we use is here is of a snow globe. It’s all been shaken up and we’re waiting for snow to settle. With all of this government change, we have to think, how do we campaign to ensure we mitigate it or turn it into a positive? The challenge is that there’s lots of change at same time.”

The brief has certainly got tougher. Homelessness had been falling, Kay points out. “But it’s now increasing as we see greater threat to housing services and housing benefits.”

With council and local government funding scarce, Kay is trying to do more with less. Demand for Shelter’s help can be seen in the requests for advice that come from the website. “We’re seeing a huge number now. There’s been a 40% increase year on year.”

To get the maximum bang for her buck, Kay evaluates the effectiveness of Shelter’s communications output, conducting a project evaluation after each campaign. “Where there are possible metrics – click-throughs, the number of pieces of coverage – we measure them. But when you’re trying to influence opinion, it’s more difficult. We’re trying to influence very big decisions, so it’s hard to say, ‘We did this and got that change’. Our project evaluation has to be a mixture of qualitative and quantitative measurement. It is so much easier when sales are your main metric.”

Kay grew up in Tameside, Manchester, an area she recently returned to as part of a Shelter campaign against rogue landlord. “That was weird,” she says. “It was all the places I’d grown up in, the same town where I used to go to Boots on a Saturday.”

At Manchester High School for Girls, she’d wanted to be a doctor but wasn’t cut out for science. Instead, she found herself drawn to marketing and, after sixth-form, was invited to join IBM marketing internship programme. Her dad was having none of it, balking at the idea of her taking a year out.

Instead, she went to Durham University to study Economics and History, and admits she made the most of the university experience. “It was two and half years of leisure time followed by half a year of military diligence,” she says.

Once she’d graduated, she immediately joined the graduate trainee programme of Nestle Rowntree, based in York. Her two years there involved brand management, key account management and even field sales.

“You had to do six months’ sales repping, turning up and coldcalling smaller newsagents. It was really good experience. You had to persuade them to take on a new merchandising system. How do you convince a shopkeeper to agree to that?”

Initially, she found it terrifying. “The first few times, I actually dried and couldn’t speak. It’s so difficult to just start the conversation. But it taught me an incredibly important lesson, that if you do something for long enough, you lose the fear. Something scary can become normal if you keep doing it.”

She admits to similar feelings in her current role when doing live TV interviews. “The fear is exactly the same. In this case, because you know what you’re saying is such a big deal.”

In January 1994, Kay headed to London, joining Johnson & Johnson in a role that encompassed key account and brand management. Although part of a global corporation, Johnson & Johnson UK Consumer employed less than 100 people. “But the combination of a huge growth agenda, within a massive global organisation, meant it was the perfect place to be in your 20s.”

True to its projections, the business doubled in the five years Kay was there, both organically and through acquisition, and its culture left a lasting mark on Kay. “There was this relentless focus on improvement, and it was led by some really good people. There top of your job function. I ended up leading the creation of a pan- European new product development process. It was daunting but I wanted to take these things on. If you showed you were up for it, there were lots of opportunities.”

Kay has tried to instil some of the same culture into Shelter. “I’ve tried to bring in the need for pace. For the recent housing benefit changes, we turned around a huge research project incredibly quickly to meet government deadlines. There’s no point having a beautiful published report if it’s ready three months after the decision was made.”

She has also magpied Johnson & Johnson’s unerring focus on talent management as well as a joined up approach to teamworking. Johnson & Johnson promoted collaboration through a cross-divisional matrix structure and at Shelter, says Kay, “everything is about integrated project management”.

“Being thrown into the fire meant that I learnt an enormous amount. I had to talk to the media, I had to do the select committees, I had to do conferences, and I had to sell my vision to the rest of the team”

By 1999, Kay found herself at a crossroads. To progress any further at Johnson & Johnson, she was going to have to take on a role outside the UK. But she’d only recently got married and wanted to start a family .

Kay felt she wanted a change while still working with blue chip companies and had her eye on a consultancy position at Oxford Strategic Marketing which allowed for home-working. So she took it and ended up staying for ten years – and having two children.

The shift to a consultancy called for a change of mindset. “At my first ever meeting, I don’t think I opened my mouth once. Working in-house, I’d got to know an organisation in real depth. But consultancy work meant being able to walk into somewhere and question a business on its core strategies having only read the brief three days earlier. By the time, I left I could do that easily.”

Providing strategic consultancy for clients including Nestle, DTZ, Vodafone and Waitrose, she still enjoyed some stability. “I was able to build up long-term relationships. That was the way the firm worked, rather than ‘pitch, project and move out again’ approach you’d get elsewhere.”

In this role, Kay found herself working alongside fellow director Jill Hilliard, who remembers Kay as “phenomenally focused”.

“She has a talent for quickly working out what motivates people – and so finding a win-win for all,” says Jill. “And she never lets you down. I’ve never seen anyone keep so many balls in the air at one time – and still have a laugh.”

Kay went on to work with the Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission and the Department of Health. In 2004, she had also become a non-executive director for Hammersmith & Fulham NHS and found herself more interested in big social issues and “less interested in working for purely commercial organisations”.

Moreover, after 10 years, she realised that she faced the choice of staying as a consultant for life, or moving on. “I decided to go work for a not for profit. I saw the job and I got it.”

That version of how she was recruited at Shelter isn’t even that abridged. “I was interviewed at 9, then phoned at 5 by Adam [Sampson, then-chief executive] who said, ‘The job’s yours. But I’m going on holiday so I need to know now.’ I thought, why not? In a way, it was a good thing I had to decide on the spot as it was a really big move which I could have deliberated over for ages. But as soon as I was told, I jumped up and punched the air. So I think my gut instinct was telling me something.”

It wasn’t the easiest induction to the role. In her first 9 months, she worked under three chief executives: Adam, his interim replacement Sam Younger and now permanent replacement Campbell Robb. Meanwhile, the department she took over hadn’t had a permanent director of communications for a year.

“But in a way, that was a great opportunity to define the role. Being thrown into the fire meant that I learnt an enormous amount. I had to talk to the media, I had to do the select committees, I had to do conferences, and I had to sell my vision to the team.”

Away from work, Kay makes the most of the time she has. “I’m a 41-year-old working mother of two,” she says. “I spend a lot of time standing by football pitches, and we also go on a lot of adventure holidays. We’re about to go to Thailand for two weeks.”

And then, batteries recharged, she’ll focus on the year ahead. Her most pressing issue since joining Shelter has been prioritising the team’s colossal workload. “But I think we need to prioritise even more next year,” she says. “This year has been more shortterm and reactive, but for next year I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how we really help more people. Now the initial new government flurry is over we are going to shift the balance to a more proactive and longer-term approach.”

It promises to be a busy 2011 for Kay. And hopefully an enjoyable one.  

Curriculum Vitae: Kay Boycott

2009 – present Director of communications, policy and campaigns, Shelter

2004 – Non-executive director and chair of audit committee, Hammersmith & Fulham Primary Care Trust

1999 – 2009 Director, Oxford Strategic Marketing

1994 –1999 Senior product manager, (later senior business account manager and group controller) Johnson & Johnson

1991 – 1994 Assistant brand manager, Nestlé Rowntree Education: Manchester High School for Girls University of Durham, BA Economics & History