Before the meeting: bring one page, not ten tabs
The stand-up only works if nobody spends the first ten minutes hunting for links. Bring one page with last month's coverage, current member submissions, draft pitches, press room updates and any deadlines that cannot move.
The owner of the meeting should prepare the page the day before. That does not mean writing a long report. It means making the decisions visible enough that the team can spend thirty minutes choosing, not remembering.
Item 1: what landed (5 minutes)
Open with the press coverage that landed last month: named outlets, named members, named campaigns. Read the headlines out loud if it is a small team. It sets a tone of progress before the conversation turns to problems.
Keep it to wins that are demonstrably yours: a national trade pickup, a regional front page, a podcast booking, a press room story that members shared heavily. Three or four pieces is plenty. This is not a recap of every link.
Item 2: what's in the inbox (10 minutes)
Spend ten minutes triaging the next month's pipeline of member submissions. Decide what gets drafted, what gets parked, what gets a polite 'no thank you', and what needs one clarifying question. The decision is the deliverable, not the discussion.
Sort each submission into one of three buckets: pitch as-is, combine with two or three others into a trend story, or hold for a future moment. Anything you cannot categorise in ninety seconds goes into hold and gets picked up next month.
Item 3: one bet (10 minutes)
Spend ten minutes picking one campaign or pitch to put extra effort behind this month. One only. The single biggest mistake small teams make is treating every release as equally important, which usually means the best story gets the same attention as the weakest one.
Pick the story that, if it lands, makes the rest of the month easier: a renewal vote coming up, a funder report due, a sector trend you can credibly own, or a member story that gives the organisation proof of value. Agree the headline, target outlets, press room assets and follow-up owner before you move on.
Item 4: what to stop (5 minutes)
Five minutes asking what the team did last month that was not worth the effort. Stop doing it. This is the item that makes the whole meeting earn its keep, and the one most often skipped because it feels less urgent than the next deadline.
Examples we have seen removed from team workflows: a weekly internal coverage email nobody read, a Friday round-up social thread, a board PDF that took four hours to format and got skimmed in two minutes, and a partner reminder email sent so often that partners stopped opening it. Replace with something shorter, or drop entirely.
After the meeting: publish the decisions
Within an hour, publish the four decisions somewhere the team can see them: what landed, what is being drafted, what the one bet is, and what has been stopped. A thirty-minute meeting without visible decisions becomes another conversation people have to remember.
The best teams keep a running monthly log. After three months it becomes the raw material for board reporting, team planning and the awkward question of where the comms team's time is actually going.
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