Connect2 · 2025 - Present
Building a consultancy that makes community engagement worth the investment
Most corporate community programmes fail quietly. The money gets spent, the reports get written, and very little changes — for the business or the community it was meant to serve. Connect2 was built to fix that: a consultancy grounded in the conviction that good community engagement and good business outcomes aren't in conflict. They just need to be designed together from the start.
Strategy · Consultancy · Research · Community
2023 →
CO-FOUNDER AND STRATEGIC LEAD
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
IP DEVELOPMENT
RESEARCH AND INSIGHT — NO MORE WASTED EFFORT
WEBSITE BUILD
STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK DEVELOPMENT
CLIENT ENGAGEMENT AND POSITIONING
THE PROBLEM
Corporate community engagement is a category with a spending problem. UK organisations collectively invest significant budget in programmes designed to benefit local communities — and a disproportionate amount of that investment produces very little of lasting value. Not because the intention isn't genuine, but because the connection between business objectives and community outcomes is almost never clearly made from the start.
The result is programmes that feel good to announce, are difficult to evaluate, and quietly get cut when budgets tighten. Communities don't benefit consistently. Businesses can't demonstrate return. And the whole category gets treated as a discretionary line item rather than a strategic one.
THE INSIGHT
The problem isn't generosity. It's architecture. Organisations approach community engagement the way they approach CSR — as something done to communities, rather than something designed with them. The programmes that work are the ones where business goals and community needs are mapped against each other before any resource is committed. The ones that fail almost always skip that step.
We called the report that surfaced this No More Wasted Effort — and the title turned out to be the clearest possible articulation of what Connect2 exists to do.
THE APPROACH
Connect2 was built around a simple offer: before you spend, think. We work with organisations at the design stage of their community programmes — helping them define what success looks like for the business and the community simultaneously, and building the structure that connects the two.
The research underpinning the consultancy drew on original insight into how and why engagement programmes fail, distilled into a framework that gives clients a practical starting point rather than a blank page. The LinkedIn content programme has built an audience of decision-makers in the corporate responsibility and community investment space, establishing Connect2 as a genuine voice in the category rather than just another consultancy.
THE RESULT