Our offices are located in Ballarat, Geelong, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane but our heartbeat – and head office – is in regional Australia. We are passionate about ensuring regional communities thrive and we understand how they operate. Most of us have grown up and been educated in regional Australia and are now choosing to raise our own families in the country. We run the running tracks, follow the local football club, volunteer for the local RFS, buy local and support local community initiatives. When regional stakeholders deal with Premier Strategy, they know we aren’t parachuting in to deal with communities – our team members are often facing similar challenges that are unique to regional life.
We invest in our relationships by providing honest advice influenced by our experience and attention to current and future factors that can impact our work.
We’ve had the privilege of working on some of Australia’s nation-changing projects which supports our mission to ‘make a difference, one project at a time’. These projects have included partnering with world leaders on the world’s largest battery, the largest wind farm in the southern hemisphere, Australia’s first wind farm in a forestry plantation, the world’s largest hydro project, and the first significant transmission project in Australia in decades.
Working on these projects has provided us with deep lived experience in engaging with outraged communities on controversial projects. It has made us resilient and provided us with the knowledge required to guide our partners when dealing with challenging experiences. We also know that we need to continually engage on the benefits of significant infrastructure and to ensure the ‘story’ of the project includes the impacted communities.
We take a team approach and together we provide our clients with a consistent level of quality service, with the right people and always with backup support. Our team has personal resilience and an orientation toward learning and improvement that supports proactivity. Put simply, we love what we do.
Why work with us?
Premier Strategy builds and maintains strong relationships with a range of stakeholders from politicians to farmers to CEOs and local businesses.
We are experienced at effectively engaging with governments while being politically agnostic. We are passionate about advocating on behalf of our clients to ensure that critical projects gain strategic alignment with government priorities. We help clients understand and work with government to ensure projects are approved, funding is received and pathways to proceed are clear.
We build strong relationships with a range of stakeholders. We do this by analysing, understanding and truly connecting with our stakeholders and treating everyone with respect. We invest in our relationships by providing honest advice influenced by our experience and attention to current and future factors that can impact our work. Our learning mindset means that we are continually improving how we engage and communicate and work with clients. Our team’s collective experience working on major projects means that we know what can be achieved when a collaborative culture is fostered.
Our culture
Premier Strategy’s success is built on a culture that has been intentionally cultivated. We call this our Culture Code. As a result, Premier Strategy was recently awarded a Great Place to Work accreditation achieving a perfect score on components associated with ‘culture’. Employees said: ‘I’m proud to tell others I work here’, ‘People care about each other here’ and ‘This is a physically safe place to work’.
Interested in our Culture Code? Contact us to find out more.
Our experience
Our credentials include strategic planning for regulated businesses, major infrastructure projects, developers and government agencies; communications design for a range of audiences; engagement planning and delivery including major infrastructure stakeholder engagement programs across a project’s lifecycle; customer service design and journey mapping and extensive experience in achieving value-based outcomes.This means we can be ‘dropped’ into a project ready to hit the ground running because we know the issues, we know the industries, we know the regulatory frameworks and we know how to engage with communities.
Our team has engaged with communities on transmission and distribution projects, new substations, batteries, solar and wind farms and pumped hydro as part of the planning and approval process, for regulatory investment tests, and for regulatory submissions. We have also worked on major road, water and social infrastructure projects and we understand the advantage that comes with taking a holistic and informed approach to creating a winning submission. We also work with councils, community groups and renewable energy developers …. just to name a few.
About
At Premier Strategy, we are proud of our rural grounding and global mindset - we reflect the essence of modern regional Australian communities.
Our specialty
Providing strategic and on-ground communication and engagement (C&E) services is our ‘jam’. It’s what we do and is our core service offering and specialisation. Because C&E is our core focus, so are you! In addition, as a small to medium business we have the flexibility to adapt to our clients’ needs quickly and efficiently. It means we can prepare landholder engagement plans, develop a community benefits fund framework, a social impact plan, a social licence framework, or a community and stakeholder engagement strategy, promptly and efficiently. With our talented visual and digital engagement team, we can create interactive assets as part of our engagement and communication approach.
Our resilience
Premier Strategy has worked on some controversial and highly sensitive projects with outraged communities. These experiences have built resilience. While we have had extensive training and experience in working in challenging situations, Premier’s philosophy is focused on strong relationships and ensuring we provide supportive, safe and empowering environments to ensure our people remain physically and psychosocially safe. This environment extends to working with others.
Our values
We have built our brand guided by the following values and we live these values every day.
We are real
We are genuine people building genuine relationships
We say what we mean and we mean what we say
We are brave, we are honest
We are loyal
We are dedicated and committed professionals
We put our clients first
We look out for our clients and each other
We work seamlessly with your team
We are curious
We think differently
We are continuously learning
We embrace complex problems
We push boundaries
Premier Strategy can easily scale-up with experienced resources, including First Nations engagement specialists, to provide a diversity of capabilities to support different project phases. We can easily scale-up with experienced resources, including First Nations engagement specialists, to provide a diversity of capabilities to support different project phases. Our critical factors to success include:
Engage early, be prepared and strategic
Long standing and broad experience with regional and diverse communities
Building reputation, earning and maintaining social licence
Creating positive economic change for communities
Demonstrated ability to fast-track and deliver major infrastructure projects
Robust strategic advice and guidance
Understanding social performance risk and having effective, proven mitigation strategies.
Memberships and accreditations
Premier uses a range of tools to effectively engage and communicate with communities and stakeholders and is a member of International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), Communication and Public Relations of Australia (CPRA) (formerly the PRIA) and International Business Association of Communicators (IBAC). Premier Strategy was recently awarded a Great Place to Work accreditation and is a member of the Clean Energy Council. We are currently undergoing B Corporation Accreditation.
