Every resident is your audience. That is what makes council communications hard.
Media releases, project updates, mayoral talking points, the weekly radio round.
Stitch is led by a journalist who has done all of it, from inside a council communications team.
You are not communicating to a market. You are communicating to everyone who lives here.
A council speaks to ratepayers and to residents who never open the rates notice. To business owners, community groups, state agencies, local media and its own staff. Often about the same decision, on the same day, in language each of them reads differently.
A water main goes in and someone loses their driveway for a fortnight. A festival needs sponsors, performers, venues and a street closed. A capital project needs three funding bodies acknowledged correctly in a single paragraph, and none of them lets it slide.
Getting that right, week after week, while the next thing is already arriving, is a skill of its own. It is also the first thing to suffer when a communications team is one person short.
Six months inside a council communications team
In February 2025 I took a six-month contract as Communications and Media Officer at Orange City Council.
I wrote the media releases and the community updates. I prepared the Mayor for his weekly radio round: up to five stations across Thursday and Friday, each with its own host, its own audience and its own appetite for detail. I wrote speeches and talking points for the Mayor, councillors and senior council staff, ran the social channels, took photographs and shot video, and sat in the meetings where a decision became something that had to be explained to a whole local government area.
Some of the best of it happened behind the scenes at the city's cultural institutions. I spent a great deal of my time inside the Orange Regional Gallery, the Orange City Library and the Orange Regional Museum, and that is where the job met the reason I became a journalist in the first place. All of it comes back to telling someone's story properly. The gallery hosted Brett Whiteley: Inside the Studio while I was there, a touring exhibition from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The library ran the Banjo Paterson Writing Awards, which went ahead without entry fees that year. And at the museum I ended up doing the video work for Assemble, its contemporary exhibition, which is not something I expected a council communications role to involve.
The range is what I would want you to notice.
Inside one stretch of weeks the work included:
a five-day LGBTQIA+ Rainbow Festival with nine sponsors, more than $60,000 raised, a street party and a fringe program hosted by local venues
Experience Orange, an annual new-residents lunch that had drawn eleven people the year before, rebuilt as a community afternoon with more than thirty stalls
the opening of a $2.5 million adventure playground funded by three separate NSW Government grants alongside a council contribution
a blue-green algae warning that closed Lake Canobolas to swimmers and their dogs, with weekly monitoring and no reopening date to offer
a plain-English case for the Mayor to put to federal and state ministers on a rail level crossing, the only one in the city without boom gates
a welcome speech for third and fourth-year medical students at the Orange School of Rural Health
the CEO's decision not to seek a new contract, after six years in the role
None of that is unusual. It is an ordinary run of weeks in a council communications team, and that is the point. I know what the workload looks like, how quickly the priorities reorder themselves, and how much of the job is turning a technical report into something a resident can act on before Thursday.
I also know what it is like to be the person a project manager finds at four o'clock with something that has to go out in the morning.
Jessica Conway, Founder
The work a council communications team does, from
someone who has done it.
Communication strategy for projects and community engagement. Working out who needs to hear about a project, how they will actually hear it, when they need to know, and in what order, before the first update goes out rather than after the first complaint.
Media liaison and media releases. Written to the standard a newsroom expects, because a newsroom is where Jess learnt it, and pitched to local media as a relationship rather than a mail-out.
Writing for council channels. Media releases, community newsletters, project updates and web copy, in one voice across all of them.
Speeches, talking points and interview preparation. Tailored to suit the voices of mayors, general managers, directors and councillors, including the question the host has not asked yet but will.
Social media. Posts residents actually read, on the works updates, the openings and the community stories that carry a council's reputation further than any annual report does.
Reputation and issues management. Public health and safety messaging, sensitive announcements and leadership changes, handled so the council is the first and clearest source rather than the last.
Carrying council communications? This is who we work with.
The general manager who needs one voice across the organisation, the community and the media, and does not have time to be the one enforcing it.
The communications manager carrying more than one person reasonably can, who needs senior help rather than another junior.
The mayor's office preparing for interviews, openings and the questions that arrive with them.
The council with a major project ahead and no capacity to explain it properly while also delivering it.
FAQs
-
That is most of what our work is. Councils rarely need another generalist. They need senior help on the projects that matter, or cover when the team is short. We often work with existing teams as support for particular events or during times of heightened workload.
-
No. Stitch as its own business identity has not held a council retainer. What we have is a founder who spent six months working inside one, as an employee of Orange City Council in 2025, doing the job a council communications team does every week.
-
One announcement or project done properly: The Headliner, from $1,995. A full communications foundation with a first round of live pitching included: The PR Sprint, from $5,990. Ongoing journalist-led media support: The Momentum Partnership, from $2,500 a month. If the problem is the message rather than the coverage, start with the Strategy Snapshot, from $1,995.
-
Council communications belong to the council, not to any one councillor. We write for the organisation and the community it serves, and we keep the work clear of party politics.