Giving VTNZ a warrant of fitness.

In 2006 our Consultus Corporate PR and Encore Training teams entered into a partnership with Vehicle Testing New Zealand. Our mission: to clarify VTNZ's strategic brand positioning and equip managers and staff with the necessary skills and capabilities to bring this positioning to life.

Since then, we've worked closely with the VTNZ management team on a number of multi-faceted change management interventions. These included designing and managing strategic vision and planning workshops for the Board of Trustees and senior managers and interviewing senior managers to determine their level of engagement, their alignment with VTNZ's desired culture and the behaviours required to affect it.

We also organised national conferences and communication seminars to obtain buy-in of the identified strategy from management and staff, created organisation-wide commitment and value statements to embody the strategy at the everyday level and produced internal advertising, media and job performance aids.

On to of all that, Encore provided 360 degree assessments for senior managers and also conducted several leadership and management training programmes and workshops to equip VTNZ's leaders with the tools, tips and techniques to lead their teams through ongoing change, productivity and system review projects.

Our involvement with VTNZ is well into its fourth year and continues stronger than ever. Our partnership and understanding of VTNZ's strategy has transformed the theory of "just-in-time training" into both a strategic and operational reality.

MainPower gusts into the future

Consultus Corporate PR has worked with South Island lines company, MainPower, for more than four years. Firstly on general positioning of its plans to engage in a range of renewable energy projects and then on its plans to build a wind farm on Mt Cass in North Canterbury, an essential part of New Zealand's energy goal of generating 90 per cent of electricity through renewable resources by the year 2025.

Mt Cass is an ecologically sensitive site, in an area that has seen previous, controversial development. We have worked closely with MainPower to develop and execute a community engagement and consultation strategy focussed around open and regular engagement. This included developing an informative 'local generation website' and distributing regular newsletters within the region to keep members of the public informed as the project developed. We have also advised on engagement with local and central government and supported all media engagement.

We're pleased to report that community support for the project has been strong and MainPower has avoided much of the negative controversy associated with other developments of this nature.