About Common Place Communication
Common Place Communication is a boutique agency specialising in advice, strategy and training to help organisations get the best outcomes through collaboration.
Common Place Communication works across various industries and in both government and private sector to create effective outcomes when it comes to collaboration, communication and change. It provides advice, training and strategy development to assist with:
Internal collaboration: busting silos within the organisation and ensuring that teams know who their internal stakeholders are and how best to work with them.
External collaboration: ensuring organisational partners work together to achieve common goals and outcomes—whether in a joint-venture scenario, state and local governments, or multi-organisation projects.
Communication: reviewing and recommending communication strategies and tactics to improve information flows and ensure everyone knows what’s going on.
Engagement: engaging with stakeholders, whether employees, external stakeholders, executive leadership, or the community. This includes community engagement for infrastructure projects, and employee engagement in change projects.
Stakeholder identification and analysis: helping to identify the key people to involve in projects and/or change, and undertake analysis to help best understand how to work with and involve them.
Change: understanding the human side of change through effective leadership, communication and working together most effectively through all kinds of change, including agile and other change methodologies.
Our founder
Our founder, Melissa Dark, has been working in communication for more than 25 years. She began her career in PR, then moved into internal and change communication, and most recently has been specialising in stakeholder engagement.
She helps organisations identify the key people who need to be part of a change or project, works to analyse and understand their needs, and then develops and advises the best communication strategy and methods to reach and engage with them. She also looks at ways to break down silos within organisations to create better collaboration, change resilience and innovation.
Common Place Communication builds on her previous consultancy, Melissa Dark and Associates, which operated for almost 15 years across Australia, New Zealand and the Asia Pacific.
In recent years, Melissa has become concerned about how managers and employees treat and speak to each other. She created Manners@Work to bring focus to these issues and help people understand how they can contribute to creating happier and more productive work places. Manners@Work brings together thinking from topics such as psychological safety, workplace etiquette, interpersonal communication and leadership. It’s advice to correspondents mixes these ideas with a dose of kindness, spirituality and a gentle reminder about personal responsibility.
Melissa has a Master’s degree in Communication and is an Accredited Business Communicator and a Certified Scrum Master. She is currently based in Brisbane, and works throughout Australia.
Melissa serves on the state advisory board of the Starlight Children’s Foundation, is a member of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2), and is a member of IAP2’s Infrastructure Community of Practice.
We support
Common Place Communication is about shared meaning and increased understanding within communities. As an organisation we have decided to support organisations that combat loneliness in the community and who endeavour to bring a dash more kindness into the world.
Queensland Community Care Network
For the past two years, Melissa has been volunteering with the QCCN as a community visitor. This has entailed being matched with a resident in an aged care facility and visiting regularly to help alleviate loneliness and disconnection. She enjoys her regular visits with M, who is full of fantastic stories about her fellow residents and family history.
The Starlight Children’s Foundation
Melissa is on the state advisory board for the Starlight Children’s Foundation in Queensland. She is passionate about the organisation’s mission, to brighten the lives of seriously ill children and their families. Melissa is grateful for the opportunity to make a contribution to an organisation that is about bringing joy to sick kids, and that does so in many innovative and resourceful ways.
Random Acts
Melissa was the Marketing Manager for Random Acts for two years, helping to build the global charity’s reach and engagement with supporters across the world. During her time with the organisation she assisted in raising more than US$300,000 to build an orphanage in Haiti, further funding to build a free high school in Nicaragua, and contributed to thousands of small acts of kindness being carried out all over the globe.
