Want your research to drive impact that's worth celebrating?

Let's make sure all the right people are invited to the party.

✓ Secure sustainable funding.

✓ Build strong partnerships and collaborations.

✓ Recruit and retain the best talent.

✓ Strengthen your org’s reputation and influence.

Is the future of your research org keeping you up at night?

✖ Concerned about your organisation's long-term financial sustainability?

✖ Frustrated by misalignment between your team's efforts and your core mission?

✖ Struggling to attract the right talent, collaborators, and partners?

✖ Questioning the return on investment from current engagement and comms efforts?

✖ Sick of seeing comms from your organisation that either don't get the research right or alienate a general audience?

Hi, I’m Chris Pahlow 👋

I’m a strategic consultant on a mission to ensure that impact-driven research orgs have the right reach, reputation, and relationships to match their impact and funding goals.

“Chris helped me break a Cat 1 funding drought! He helped us communicate the benefit of our work to society, which was crucial in finally securing an ARC Discovery grant.”

Prof. Phillip Dawson
Co-Director, Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning

“Chris brings knowledge, creativity, and compassion to his work along with extraordinary design sense. His understanding of the research world is valuable in helping craft a strategy that works in our ecosystem. I would work with him again in a second.”

Prof. Wendy Chapman
Director, Centre for Digital Transformation of Health

“Chris helped me focus on what the audience needs and how they need to hear it. He delivered a high-quality product that we'll be using for years to come.”

A/Prof. Nikki Moodie
Deputy Director, Atlantic Fellows for Social Equity

Meaningful impact takes more than just “better comms”.

We’ve all seen strategy documents that gather dust for years, websites that are out of date the moment they launch, and comms or engagement initiatives that don’t deliver real results...

Generating meaningful, sustained outcomes doesn’t come from one-off “silver bullet” projects...

It comes from — 

  • A holistic approach that considers your org’s strategy, structure, culture, and most critical relationships in an integrated way, rather than tackling them in isolation.

  • Putting your best foot forward by balancing immediate operational realities with careful analysis and strategic thinking, before diving into expensive and resource-intensive new initiatives.

  • Building capability and equipping your team with practical tools, frameworks, and systems so they can sustainably manage strategic comms and engagement internally.

  • Proactive risk management to protect your org’s reputation.

  • Continual evaluation and improvement to refine what works and respond as your organisation evolves or the context changes.

These principles underpin my Adaptive Relationship-Building Model — designed specifically to help research organisations increase internal alignment, clearly understand and prioritise the relationships that matter most, strategically tailor comms and engagement, and build internal capability to deliver meaningful, sustained impact.

Where would you like to start?

Which of the following would make the biggest difference to your org right now?

Strengthen your org’s most critical relationships in 90 days

“Chris has provided invaluable support in unpacking the complexities of projects involving multiple stakeholders with different priorities.”

Marnie Long
Manager, Careers & Employability, the University of Melbourne

Increase your team's comms capacity and capability in 90 days

“It gave me a lot of clarity on where things sit and how to focus my time and energy moving forward.”

Dr Juliana Silva
COO, GIN Discovery Program, Monash University

Align and empower your team with a tailored workshop

“Chris' superpower is facilitating the challenging conversations that need to be had if curiosity-led researchers are to align around a common mission-driven research strategy.“

Dr Meredith Layton
Senior Lead, Strategy and Engagement, Centre for Digital Transformation of Health

Book in a call to see if we’re a good fit to work together.