Photographs by Jeff Leyshon

David Hamilton’s teenage years didn’t quite go as planned. Unlike many of his friends, Hamilton was not destined for a straight set of top grades and a fast track into a Russell Group university. In the first few months of his A levels, he developed Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. As Hamilton, head of public relations and engagement for Action for Children, recalls those miserable months it’s hard to believe that a man now known for his boundless energy and commitment to the professionalisation of PR, spent much of the next two years in his bed.

Yet, for Hamilton, these years gave him the opportunity to develop a digital skillset that has stayed with him throughout his career. “I had a lot of time on my hands, so I taught myself how to use computers, and from there how to design websites.” This was in the late ’90s, a time when a little knowledge could open many doors, “I was unlucky that I was stuck in bed, but actually quite lucky that I had the opportunity to learn those skills. I managed to set up a relatively successful company. After a few false starts I was developing websites for businesses, charities and local government.”

Hamilton ran his agency, Digital UK, for nearly three years, but 2000 was the year the UK dotcom bubble burst, and its last six months saw Digital UK’s workload evaporate. For Hamilton, it was time to combine the digital skills of his agency with the communication skills of running a business and face the challenge of finding a salaried job.

Hamilton’s father was a journalist with the BBC, and journalism, PR and the media were familiar subjects. Websites were beginning to be defined as public relations’ territory, so Hamilton focused on a PR career. While his head chose the role, the location was driven from his heart. Hamilton had begun a long distance relationship with a student from Nottingham. When she finished her degree, she moved home to Spalding, Lincolnshire. Hamilton followed and started a job running the digital communications for the local authority, South Holland Council.

For Hamilton the job was instantly rewarding. The relationship less so. Within weeks of moving to Lincolnshire it was over, “I had this difficult decision when the relationship ended. There I was, in a small, very quiet, South Lincolnshire market town. Do I stay in this job that I had just started at the council or do I go home and try and get back into web design and digital comms? I thought ‘no, I’ll stick it out. I’ll stick it out for a year and then I’ll come back.’”

Hamilton spent the next nine years in Lincolnshire. He enjoyed his time at South Holland Council. Local authority communications provide a far wider remit than outsiders would perceive. As Hamilton recalls, “Councils provide literally hundreds of different services and in some of those essential teams you don’t really have many people. So a comms role often requires you to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in with a bit of everything. I wouldn’t say you become an expert but you have to know an unusual amount of detail to provide comms support to these services.”

During Hamilton’s time at South Holland Council he also learned about politics, how to work with politicians and how to work with senior people from chief executives to other directors. More importantly, he says he got the opportunity to build a career in a way that perhaps, without a degree, might have eluded him in a similar position in London.

Although a digital comms position, the South Holland Council role leaned more towards the digital than the comms and, having created the website and the intranet, Hamilton needed further challenges. There weren’t many opportunities in the Lincolnshire area but Hamilton saw an advertisement for the role of digital communications manager with Fenland Council. In 2004, Fenland Council had a bad reputation. It was regularly cited as one of Britain’s poorest performing councils in both national and local press, and 50% of its media coverage was either negative or critical. For Hamilton, this was the challenge he sought. He went for the job, not really expecting to get it, but wanting to prove to himself he was capable of the upward move. Hamilton concedes, however, it wasn’t just himself that needed the proof, “The job paid more money but there was part of me that wanted to prove to my parents that I could do it. I think there was an element of concern from them that I hadn’t gone to university. 

Like many successful people who have made their achievements without a college degree, Hamilton has had moments in his life in which he felt he had to prove something. Whether he needed to or not is a moot point. In his 20s, he garnered a hat-trick of ‘young professional of the year’ trophies – PR Week, CorpComms magazine and the CIPR – and this year, now 34, Hamilton was crowned the Institute of Director’s and CIPR’s PR director of the year. Yet this desire to show he was just as capable as his colleagues with qualifications was most visible in those early days of his career. “I wouldn’t call it anxiety as such but there was something,” Hamilton says. “I definitely felt uneasy about not having the same academic qualifications as my peers and my friends. It made me work longer hours and do more just to prove that I didn’t need the paper. 

He certainly needed to work long hours at Fenland Council. On the verge of forced government intervention, the council was a basket case, failing in the provision of all but the most basic of services. Shortly before Hamilton joined, however, Fenland Council had appointed a new CEO, Tim Pilsbury, who set about transforming the council. For Hamilton, Pilsbury was a revelation. “Tim Pilsbury is one of the most important people in my career. I learned a huge amount about stakeholder relations, about leadership, about developing staff. He was an absolutely inspirational guide,” he says.

Although Hamilton had gone into the council to work solely on digital communications, it wasn’t long before his role broadened and within a year he became Fenland Council’s communications manager.

He is still enthusiastic about the changes the council undertook. During the six-and-a-half years he spent there, Fenland went from being one of Britain’s poorest performing councils to Britain’s best district council, winning 60 national awards in his last two years. The metrics of communications success gush forth from Hamilton, “The relationship with the local press completely transformed from well over 50% negative critical coverage to just over 10%,” he says, quickly adding the secret of the success, “People had been scared of the local paper. They had a no comment policy. We just started to engage with the journalists and almost overnight it transformed the way that even the local people felt about their council.”

Hamilton says he learned the craft of PR and communication during his time at Fenland, but he also is proud of the council’s achievements beyond his own communications remit. As he recalls, “We were all working to improve the reputation of the council. We knew that it wasn’t just about our jobs but about improving the community. It was always focused on that, and on the local people. Fenland had some of the most deprived wards in Europe, with one ward having the highest level of teenage pregnancy and many other issues. Schools were outside our remit, but we still worked with one local school to increase the number of struggling families benefiting from free school meals. We pioneered new services. It was a very rural area, very poor public transport, so we worked to ease the social isolation particularly for younger people.”

It’s obvious that Hamilton is motivated by the concept of public service. Pressed, he concedes, “I don’t want to sound clichéd about it, but I do want to do something more than just earn money. There is an aspect of giving something back that I find appealing.

It was during these years that the PR and communications awards came thick and fast. And with each addition to the trophy cabinet came calls from headhunters. The calls were mainly to work for agencies, on a considerably higher salary than Hamilton was earning at the time. He’s reluctant to dismiss agency life, but says it didn’t feel right at the time, “It sounds great; the diversity and the range of projects all sound brilliant, but there was always something inside me that said this wasn’t quite the way for me right now and I just knew that there was something else. And then when the Action for Children role came up I thought, ‘Yeah, this seems right.’”

For six months, Hamilton had felt the time was right to leave Fenland. He was keen to return to London but also swingeing axes were swinging within local authorities and the comms budgets were often first to be chopped. He was then offered two positions in the same week. The other job, a comms head for a housing authority paid more, but Hamilton didn’t hesitate in choosing Action for Children.

More importantly, any of Hamilton’s lingering insecurities were now truly buried. “To begin with,” he says. “There was a sense of awe in coming to London, and when I went in, there were some really talented people. But actually I felt like I could bring something new. It is a senior role and I was the expert and so I knew I had to deliver. But, importantly for me, I felt I was able to deliver.”

Hamilton has a large team, at times up to 20 staff. He says it is always difficult coming into a new team, but there were two lessons he learned from his time at Fenland Council. The first is recruiting the right people. The second is to give them the right development opportunities and invest time in them. “At Fenland Council, they really invested their time in me and now I feel I need to give that back to other people,” he says.

This concept of public service is a constant theme with Hamilton. It extends beyond the role he plays with Action for Children. In his spare time Hamilton co-chairs the not-for-profit chapter of the CIPR, was elected to the CIPR Council and sits on the PR Council of the PRCA. He’s recently started to co-author a book on communications and positively bounces off the walls with seemingly limitless energy.

Ironically for the man who felt his unfinished education left him with so much to prove, he now lectures to PR students. “I do feel I am now in a place in my career where a degree won’t make any difference at all,” he finally concedes, adding, “Although actually I wouldn’t mind studying for the sake of studying. Lecturing has given me a taste for academia.”