The Medway Group works with clients in two ways – consulting services and training. Get full descriptions of training modules here.
Read case studies about how the Medway Group is working with different types of clients.
Strategic communications planning
Reba follows a lesson learned from her dad – you’ve got to plan the work before you can work the plan. She lives by research and measurement to ensure she’s creating a communications strategy aligned with a client’s big vision.
Reba’s work can involve developing a plan for an organization to implement itself or she can take the plan to full execution. Her planning work spans projects as diverse as podcast/vodcast development, staffing plans, communications audits and organizational strategic planning.
Presentation skills training
After 35+ years fielding questions in a variety of presentation scenarios and training others to be comfortable doing it, Reba coaches new and seasoned professionals to be calm and resourceful in a stressful media or presentation situation. She has decades of experience coaching local, state and national leaders to present with polish and confidence.
Reba is particularly enthusiastic about coaching speaking and writing skills for professionals whose job descriptions don’t include speaking and writing as a primary job role. She has long believed that everyone can benefit professionally by fine tuning their spoken and written word skills. Reba has seen it over and over at every level of an organization – the people who can speak and write with confidence are the people who leaders want around their leadership table.
Advocacy outreach
Reba understands advocacy means far more than just front-lines lobbying. It’s about strategy, stakeholder engagement and a long game with targeted messaging and clear goals. Whether it’s a grassroots/grasstops approach to securing funding, messaging to position an organization’s policy initiatives or a direct lobbying campaign, Reba knows how to match strategy to challenge.
After spending 35+ years in the halls of Congress, the SC Statehouse and more city halls than she can count, Reba understands the difference between policy and politics, and she knows people all over the state. She’s led advocacy initiatives for federal and state funding issues and spearheaded a multi-year advocacy plan resulting in one of the most significant shifts in tax administration in years.
Reba’s background at the intersection of communications and government gives her the perfect vantage point to help clients build a realistic, creative and accountable advocacy plan. She’s been doing this kind of work forever and has received recognition at the state and national levels – notably receiving the national grassroots advocacy award from America’s Public Television Stations (the national public media advocacy organization) for SCETV’s digital conversion plan.
The Medway Group also curates a highly detailed legislative database that includes data far beyond just contact information. Clients can “mix and match” from numerous data sources that overlay legislative districts with a wide variety of demographics and interests.
Writing
Specializing in making the complex understandable, Reba ensures her clients’ messages resonate with the right audience. From speeches and opinion columns to feature articles and social content, Reba writes it. She’s considered herself a writer since the fourth grade when she won a VFW essay contest.
Reba’s diverse writing work has appeared in national business publications, regional lifestyle magazines, and countless other print and digital publications. Her writing has won multiple awards from the SC Press Association, the Public Relations Society of America, the SC Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators and the National Educational Television Association.
Reba’s personal writing projects live on her blog, Random Connect Points. Find her professional writings in the Medway Group’s Stories. Reba also teaches writing at the Buckley School of Public Speaking focusing on how to organize writing for clarity and persuasion.
Editing
Give Reba a style guide and a purple pen, and she’s in her element. (She believes in using a purple editing pen instead of a red one to dispel the myth that editing is “correcting” someone’s writing.)
While some people may find editing to be a chore, Reba sees it as a puzzle to be solved. She takes on projects from basic proofreading to highly complex academic and legal documents to deliver a polished, understandable product. Although she claims to be personally in the “Anti-Oxford comma” camp, she easily adapts to any style and frequently creates customized style guides for clients.