Behind the Brand: Rosie Gogoley on building an in-house PR strategy at Skipton Building Society

Moving in-house often means far more than changing employers. It means becoming part of a business's long-term vision, understanding commercial objectives, collaborating with teams across the organisation and finding opportunities that support both brand reputation and business growth.

At Skipton Building Society, PR sits at the heart of those conversations. Whether it's reacting to the day's biggest headlines, bringing housing challenges to life through integrated campaigns or translating complex financial topics into stories people genuinely care about, the communications team plays an important role in helping people understand one of the UK's most trusted financial brands.

Leading a lot of that work is Rosie Gogoley, Public Relations Lead at Skipton Building Society. After spending several years agency-side, Rosie moved in-house earlier this year and has quickly become immersed in a role that combines strategic thinking, creativity, and cross-functional collaboration.

In this edition of Behind the Brand, Rosie shares what surprised her most about moving client-side, why curiosity has become one of the most valuable skills for in-house PR professionals, how campaigns come together behind the scenes, and why authentic storytelling will continue to shape the future of communications.

About Rosie Gogoley

Rosie Gogoley is Public Relations Lead at Skipton Building Society, where she oversees reactive media relations and thought leadership and supports integrated PR campaigns. After several years working agency-side across financial services clients, she joined Skipton to help shape the organisation's communications strategy from within, working alongside teams across marketing, mortgages, savings and financial advice to tell stories that build trust and connect with customers.

Working In-House at Skipton Building Society

What does a typical week look like for you as Public Relations Lead at Skipton Building Society?

My role is fairly centred around reactive PR, so after catching up on emails, I usually start the day by looking at the news and reaching out to journalists if there is anything for us to comment on. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are our office days, so they are more meeting-focused, where we connect on wider plans across marketing. This can include a weekly PR team meeting, brainstorming sessions, campaign planning, content forums and research and product check-ins. The rest of my time can be split between a mix of strategy and delivery. I’m always looking for new ways to tell Skipton’s story throughout my week, whether that’s through research, case studies, thought leadership or reactive opportunities. However, it sounds cliché, but no two weeks have ever been the same since I joined in March. Some weeks I’ll be heading to a conference in Brighton or an awards show in London, and we’ve had some really exciting campaign activations in Manchester and Leeds over the past few months. The variety is one of the best things about working in PR.

You moved from agency life into an in-house role, what’s surprised you most about working brand-side?

How invested people are across the business about PR. Agency-side, you can sometimes find yourself having to demonstrate PR’s value, especially if the client sits within an SEO or brand-focused role. In-house, I’ve found that colleagues are genuinely excited by the stories we tell and coverage we secure. There’s a real sense of how much PR contributes to the overall business, which makes the role really rewarding.

What originally attracted you to moving into an in-house leadership role?

Agencies are a fantastic starting point for a career in PR, and I think they are a great place to learn the fundamentals of client management and creative thinking. But as I’ve progressed into leadership roles, I wanted to have a greater influence over long-term strategy rather than working across a changing portfolio of clients. The other part was that this just felt like a natural next step as I’ve worked predominantly with financial services clients across my time at agencies. I’ve always admired Skipton as a brand, and the objectives of the role aligned with my biggest strengths in PR, so it felt like the perfect opportunity.

What’s been the biggest learning curve since leading PR internally?

Understanding how to slow down and make the most of the expertise around you. On the agency side, I’m used to racing to get comments signed off quickly with clients and putting them in front of journalists. In-house, the story must align with our overall business goals, and we aren’t just reacting to every opportunity. We need to be able to add something new to the conversation. And the best way to do this is to speak to our own subject-matter experts. As a PR, you’re often working across different topics that you have an understanding of, but our experts will bring a depth of perspective that could completely change the angle.

Has moving in-house changed the way you think about campaign success?

I wouldn’t say it’s changed how I see value from a digital perspective, but how important brand is and how PR is part of sharing that success. Coverage and links are one thing, but relevancy, tone and reinforcing a positive brand perception are just as meaningful to meeting overall business goals. It’s hard to get that at an agency, where you’re usually under pressure to meet link metrics or you have priority metrics that can suddenly change due to the client’s needs.

What qualities do you think make someone genuinely well-suited to working in-house?

Ownership, curiosity, and passion. You must be confident in speaking up for what you may need or getting the rest of the business on board with your idea, as in-house PR requires you to take responsibility for your own area. Agency-side, you may work across one account with a mix of team members, but in-house, you are expected to drive things forward yourself.

Curiosity is also important. It’s valuable to build relationships, ask questions and take an interest in areas outside of your immediate role in-house. Finally, it helps to be working for a brand that appeals to you and in an industry you’re passionate about, as you’re immersed in one organisation rather than several clients agency-side.

How Skipton Building Society Plans Award-Winning PR Campaigns

Skipton has produced some fantastic integrated campaigns recently, from the Reformer Pilates activation to the giant blue door in Manchester. How do campaigns like these come together from initial insight to final execution?

We have a great relationship with our PR agency, 72Point, which supports these types of integrated campaigns, and they can start in a few different ways. Sometimes we’ll share a brief with a specific objective in mind, or we can bounce around ideas in an organised session. 

The giant blue door activation (“Locked Out” campaign) actually came from an internal conversation around how we could celebrate the third-year anniversary of our Track Record Mortgage. From there, we worked with 72Point to develop the idea and explore whether there was a wider consumer insight behind it. That’s always a key part of the process. We don’t want to create something for the sake of it, there needs to be a real story behind it. 

For a homes campaign like the “Locked Out” campaign, we would work closely with our mortgage experts, marketing colleagues and social media team to make sure we’re maximising the opportunity across different channels. Once agreed, it’s all about turning it into reality. That can mean commissioning research, developing media materials, securing case studies or talent, managing logistics and making sure every detail is in place for launch day. The final few weeks are often the busiest, with lots of moving parts coming together right up until the event itself.

One challenge people often associate with in-house PR is balancing creativity with brand protection. How do you approach that at Skipton Building Society?

As a building society, everything we do must be appropriate for our members and customers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be creative. We always look to start our campaigns with real challenges or insights, and then it’s about finding how brand purpose and creativity can work together rather than compete with each other. Recent campaign activations show we can take a serious issue where people feel locked out of the housing market and bring it to life in a way that’s engaging but still completely aligned with our purpose.

What’s a recent Digital PR campaign you’re particularly proud of and why did it perform so well?

Recent campaigns like the Locked Out and Reformer Pilates activations have been excellent, but for me, the best ideas I work on are often the simplest ones to help tell a customer story differently. For example, one of our surveys found that one in seven people in an age group approaching retirement (over 65s) believed less than £100,000 would fund their dream retirement. 

With pensions and retirement regularly making headlines, we knew there was an opportunity to add further context to this conversation. We then worked closely with our financial advice team to calculate how long a £100,000 pension pot would last against the current Retirement Living Standards even with a state pension – and the results were eye-opening! 

What made the campaign work was that it combined a strong consumer insight with expert analysis and genuinely useful guidance for people planning their futures. It resonated strongly with the media, securing coverage in titles like Express, GB News and iNews, while sparking conversations about whether people are saving enough for the retirement they want. For me, it’s a great example of how some successes don’t always need a big activation.

What trends are you personally paying attention to right now?

 I’ve never seen more demand in the industry for case studies than now. Authenticity-driven storytelling is dominating engagement, which means audiences are more likely to engage with someone’s personal experience. For campaigns, we’re moving from just having strong data to support them to creating a bank of real customer experiences to show what that insight looks like. Audience behaviour is also changing, and we’re seeing people crave more participation with the brands they love. The strongest ideas are ones that people can be a part of.

Has working in-house changed the way you approach ideation and campaign planning compared to agency life?

Yes and no. Agency side, you are working across lots of different clients, so there are more opportunities to bounce ideas around. At Skipton, we still work hard to fit in the time to ideate across wider teams, whether it’s our newsjacking meetings to share ideas about trends and what other competitors are doing, or our monthly seasonal meetings where social, content and PR align on targeting any key periods or awareness days. Campaign planning is slightly different as you need to be more aligned with other areas that the business is focusing on or a particular audience we’re trying to reach.  access to both quantitative and qualitative data from our teams in the office, which can help to inspire or shape stories.

Building PR Buy-In: Demonstrating Value Across the Business

How do you communicate the value of PR internally to wider stakeholders or leadership teams?

We’re lucky to have a leadership team that really values PR and understands the role it plays in supporting commercial objectives while building brand trust. That being said, I think it’s still important to show the wider impact beyond the coverage numbers to help showcase that value. We also look to bring campaigns to life internally. For example, we did an activation with colleagues for the giant blue door, with prizes on offer to those who unlocked it. We also use these opportunities to talk about the campaign or the product behind it. This helps the wider business see PR not just as media coverage, but also how people are responding to it and the conversations we’re generating.

Financial services can sometimes be seen as a complex or serious sector. How do you make topics like mortgages, savings and housing feel relevant and engaging for everyday audiences?

It’s about taking a complicated topic and connecting it back to an experience people relate to and do care about, whether that’s saving for a first house, planning for retirement, or feeling more confident with their finances. Our best stories usually focus on the real-life impact and use research, case studies and expert commentary to show that.

What do you think brands and PR teams need to do to maintain trust with journalists moving forward?

With the rise of AI, it’s the smaller things that matter. Being transparent about your sources, having detailed profiles for them and providing robust evidence for your data makes it easier for journalists to verify information. Building relationships with journalists is more important than ever, so being quick to respond, helpful and chatty solidifies that credibility if they like working with you.

AI has been one of the biggest talking points in communications this year. Where do you think it will genuinely add value, and where do you think human creativity will always be essential?

AI has definitely made things more efficient. Gone are the days when you’d spend hours trying to find the perfect sources for your research. It’s also excellent at spotting trends across data and summarising information. But I don’t see it replacing people in crafting relationships, being creative and making certain judgement calls. AI can be a good starting point for ideas, but there are gaps in how it can understand culture, business goals, or simply what will resonate with a certain audience. For me, it’s about using AI to handle more of the admin side, but it can’t replace the instinct that comes from experience.

Building an In-House Career and What’s Next for Digital PR

Having worked both agency-side and in-house, what makes an agency genuinely valuable to an internal PR team?

Agencies usually have access to specialist tools, bring experience from different industries and are more up to date with where the marketing industry is heading. It’s about them bringing a fresh perspective and challenging thinking. 

What advice would you give agency PRs looking to move into an in-house PR role?

You’re no longer an external counterpart advising from the outside, you’re now part of the business and its long-term objectives. You definitely want to get curious about the business outside of PR. Understanding commercial objectives, learning from subject matter experts and building internal relationships will make you much more effective in-house. 

How do you think the role of in-house Digital PR teams will evolve over the next few years?

As search behaviour continues to evolve, I think we will see in-house PR teams become more knowledgeable across areas like SEO and GEO, particularly how content is discovered and referenced. At the same time, I expect the divide between traditional and digital to get smaller. The strongest campaigns already combine both, so the distinction will become less important as teams focus on delivering results across the full communications mix.

I also think we’ll see more businesses invest in building specialist capabilities internally, rather than outsourcing everything to agencies. That doesn’t mean agencies are becoming less important, but having people in-house who can immerse themselves fully in the brand is incredibly valuable.

One of the most interesting themes throughout Rosie's interview is that great in-house PR isn't about simply securing coverage. It's about understanding the wider business, building relationships with experts across the organisation and finding stories that genuinely help audiences while supporting long-term brand objectives.

As communications continues to become more integrated across PR, social, content and marketing, the ability to collaborate internally and think beyond traditional media metrics will only become more valuable. Rosie's insights offer a brilliant look at what modern in-house PR really involves, and why curiosity, commercial understanding and strong storytelling are becoming just as important as media relationships themselves.