Communicate: Edinburgh
Join Interact and a select group of internal comms, people experience, and digital workplace professionals for a free in-person event in Edinburgh
Communicate: Edinburgh is your chance to connect with peers at The Johnnie Walker, Princes Street with beautiful views of Edinburgh Castle.
Register now
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Why Attend?
Join us in the heart of Edinburgh for a day of conversation, connection, and fresh thinking at Communicate: Edinburgh, Interact’s event for internal comms and employee experience professionals.
Hosted at Johnnie Walker Princes Street, an iconic eight-floor landmark in the heart of the city, with breathtaking views of Edinburgh Castle. You’ll spend the day with a welcoming group of peers exploring how internal comms and EX can make a real difference at work.
What to expect:
- Honest, practical talks from those leading comms and EX in their organisations
- Interactive sessions that get you thinking
- Plenty of time to share ideas and network
- A relaxed drinks reception to round things off in style
Whether you’re new to comms or have years of experience, you’ll leave with something valuable and a few new connections too.
Spaces are limited, so early booking is encouraged.
Check out our recent events to see why they’re so popular:
Agenda
- From 9:30Breakfast & Registration
- 10:00Welcome Note
- Channel4: Have you tried turning search off and on again?
Behind every useful AI Search answer is content people can trust. In this session, Channel 4 shares how it built the foundations for AI Search through the relaunch of their intranet, MOSS, from structuring content and clarifying ownership to testing permissions and identifying gaps. Through a real employee search journey, the team will show how it is making knowledge easier to find, what it has learned along the way and how Channel 4 and Interact are continuing to improve the experience.
- Reawaken the Spirit of Work
Culture at work isn’t what we say it is. It’s how people experience it every day. And right now, for too many people, that experience feels flat, fragmented and transactional.
Work is big part of life. It can be where people grow, connect, contribute and become more of themselves. But too often, workplaces leave too much of that potential untapped.
Through evidence, storytelling and sharp reflection, this session explores what helps people feel more alive at work, why connection and energy matter, and what we need to do to create the conditions where the sheer brilliance of people can fully emerge. Not someday in the future. Now.
- Roundtable: The next generation of employee experience
Employee experience is evolving faster than most frameworks can keep up with. This roundtable moves beyond theory — small groups, real challenges, honest conversation about what’s working, what’s broken, and what the next generation of employee experience actually needs to look like. You’ll leave with peer perspective you won’t find in a report.
- Inside Barnardo’s: where connection meets purpose
How do you create one trusted digital home for colleagues working across services, shops, communities and offices?
Barnardo’s shares how it moved from fragmented channels and important messages missing more than a third of colleagues to Inside Barnardo’s on Interact. Drawing on independent employee research and one year of platform data—including 561,246 searches and 88% of users logging in—the session explores how the charity built the case for change, what adoption looks like in practice and where it is focusing next.
- Panel: Changing the channel isn’t enough
The discussion will explore what makes an employee platform genuinely useful: the problem each organisation needed to solve, the choices made, how engagement has been maintained and what needs to evolve next.
- 3:50 - 4:50The Johnnie Walker Experience Tour
- 4:50 - 7:00Networking Drinks
Speakers
Heather Corley
MCIPR, CIIC | Communications and Engagement Manager at University of Glasgow
Heather is a CIPR accredited communications professional with a focus on internal engagement, digital communications, and crisis navigation. She holds the CIPR Professional PR Diploma and brings seven years of experience in Higher Education staff and student communications. Alongside her professional work, Heather is Co-Creator and Committee Lead of the University of Glasgow MPA Peer Network, a voluntary role in which she directs strategy and manages communications. The Network is designed to improve the working lives of UofG professional services staff through events, opportunities, and connections.
Siobhan Madaras
Head of Internal Communications at Barnardo’s
Siobhan is an experienced communications professional with a demonstrated history of working across public, private, and third sector organisations. Skilled in internal and external communications, copywriting, marketing, strategy, event management, digital, and journalism.
Anthony Ellis
Communications and Engagement expert at Barnardo’s
Anthony is an innovative Communication and Engagement expert with over 10 years of communications experience. He excels at developing key stakeholder relationships for maximum impact, enhancing brand through diligent and consistent market research. Producing impactful concepts across email, digital and video campaigns for a variety of audiences whilst delivering fundamental and concise messaging with high writing capabilities.
Eleanor Chipperfield
Internal Communications Creative and Channel Manager at Channel 4
Over the past five years at Channel 4, Eleanor has led comms channel launches and relaunches, introduced new ways for colleagues to share and discover information, streamlined internal communications, and helped teams tell their stories in ways that resonate. Whether launching a digital tool, refreshing an intranet, developing channel strategy, or supporting a major business initiative, she is always looking for ways to improve the employee experience through better communication.
Giada Foniciello
Internal Communications Manager at Brodies LLP
With over a decade of professional experience, Giada currently works as the Internal Communications Manager at Brodies LLP, bringing expertise in employee engagement and internal communications strategy. She is motivated by the opportunity to build meaningful connections and is committed to fostering inclusive and engaged working environments.
Martin Stubbs-Partridge
Employee Communications Specialist at Scottish Funding Council
Martin builds employee experiences that work for the people using them, not just the org chart above them. At the Scottish Funding Council, he launched the digital workplace and watched adoption take off, putting the organisation in the top 25% globally for it. He has also contributed to Rachel Millar's book on change communication, because getting people through change is half the job. Martin is an accredited Agile practitioner and a project manager who likes to move quickly without breaking things. He has spent his career working alongside stakeholders at every level, from frontline teams to the boardroom.
Helen Bissett
Founder of H&H
Curious minds, bold questions and brave ideas have fuelled Helen’s work for more than 20 years. She works through the big stuff: setting direction, navigating change, rebuilding trust and creating the conditions for people to feel more connected, more alive and able to do brilliant work. Her work has reached tens of thousands of employees across global brands, and it’s the human bit that fascinates her most. What makes us come alive? What helps us connect? And what changes when people can bring more of themselves every day? Straight-talking, curious and future-focused, Helen blends evidence, experience to challenge old assumptions about work. At the heart of it is a simple belief: work is part of life. And it can be one of the places where people grow, connect, contribute and become more of themselves.
