Empowering research leaders to drive lasting and meaningful impact.

Hi, I’m Chris Pahlow 👋 I provide strategic consulting tailored to the unique challenges that research leaders face. My holistic approach is designed to help you build relationships with all the key players who matter most to your work’s success.

✓ Secure sustainable funding.

✓ Build strong partnerships and collaborations.

✓ Recruit and retain the best talent.

✓ Shape your projects and teams for impact.

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?

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

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

“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 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

“Chris has been instrumental in helping us move from our startup phase to a new way of working. He has helped us hone our messages and create new leadership and governance structures and has done it with sensitivity and pragmatism. 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 has provided invaluable support in unpacking the complexities of projects involving multiple stakeholders with different priorities. I would not hesitate to recommend Chris for any consultancy work focused on strategic communications and engagement. He'll support you in meeting objectives while challenging you to consider things from a different perspective.“

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

How we can work together

  • Step 1: Start with clarity and confidence

    We’ll start by clarifying your goals, challenges, and priorities, before developing a tailored and actionable initial strategic roadmap so that your team can focus effort and resources where they'll generate the greatest outcomes.

  • Step 2: Kick-start your priorities

    Next, we’ll put your roadmap into practice through targeted projects and initiatives, carefully aligned to your goals to ensure tangible results.

  • Step 3: Continuously embed and improve

    While one-off projects can help move the needle, meaningful long-term impact comes from consistent effort and adaption. I can support your team to embed new practices, respond effectively to real-world insights, and continuously improve your outcomes over time.

Start with clarity and confidence

Initial strategic roadmapping $10,000 AUD + GST

There are countless things you could spend your precious time and funding on — but they won’t all deliver the results you want. I’ve seen too many examples of research organisations spending years and tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars on initiatives that don’t generate meaningful outcomes. 

So let’s get started by carving out a small portion of your total budget so that we can analyse, strategise, and make a plan that’s all about long-term sustainability and maximising your return on investment. I'll get to know your team, your unique opportunities and challenges, and then develop a practical and focused initial strategic roadmap that outlines a clear set of priority actions for your organisation.

Not ready for roadmapping, but have something urgent or specific you need immediate advice on? Get started with a one-off consult for $1,350 AUD + GST per session.

Key areas we can
tackle together

Your initial strategic roadmap may include some of the following areas —

Build alignment for impact

Kick-start your priorities:

Collective impact requires alignment, and this starts with your own team. I can facilitate workshops for your team to clarify your goals, impact plan, mission, values, culture, and org design.

Continuously embed and improve:

We’ve all seen strategic plans that no one reads and team building days that feel like box-ticking exercises. Regular pulse-checks can help you understand if your org is heading in the right direction, and follow-up consults or workshops can empower your team to iterate what’s already working and co-design new initiatives.

Map and manage key stakeholders

Kick-start your priorities:

Let’s prioritise the key stakeholder groups for each part of your organisation and define critical stakeholder personas — profiles designed to help your team better understand their needs, motivations, and preferences.

Continuously embed and improve:

The better you understand your key stakeholders, the more effective your comms and engagement will be. So as your team gains more data, it’s important to keep improving your existing stakeholder personas and building up your database with additional personas as new groups become important to your team.

Clarify your key messages

Kick-start your priorities:

Using what we’ve learned from stakeholder mapping, let’s refresh your key collateral and craft a master document of clear and consistent key messages that are designed to help your team engage effectively with your most important stakeholders.

Continuously embed and improve:

Every time your team engages with a stakeholder is an opportunity to test and improve your messages. Quarterly reviews keep your messaging sharp, effective, and responsive to new insights, capabilities, or stakeholder priorities.

Craft targeted strategies for your comms & engagement

Kick-start your priorities:

Building on everything we’ve crystalised so far, let's design strategies that directly target your highest-priority stakeholders, ensuring that your comms and engagement activities have clear, measurable outcomes.

Continuously embed and improve:

Effective comms and engagement strategies are data-driven and responsive. By continuously tracking performance and making refinements month-on-month, let’s ensure your team keeps heading in the right direction and can move with agility when the context changes.

Set-up/optimise your team’s comms

Kick-start your priorities:

I’ll work with your operations team to establish processes and tools that empower them to navigate the many competing relationships and priorities that can exist in a research org so that they can deliver strategically-aligned and effective comms.

Continuously embed and improve:

Embedding new processes and tools doesn't happen overnight. Ongoing coaching can support your team as they adopt new workflows, refine things based on real-world experience, and continue integrating new tools and approaches as needed.

Prepare for high-stakes engagements

Hike-stakes engagements can make or break your project or organisation. I’ll help you clearly define compelling, targeted messaging, and coach your team to confidently deliver presentations, pitches, or conversations that resonate deeply — ensuring you make the most of these critical opportunities.

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