Colgate-Palmolive Builds Budget Requests on Interviews, Not Spreadsheets

Colgate-Palmolive's communications team starts its budget process with sit-down leader interviews and a full program audit — before anyone opens a spreadsheet. Robert Goodfellow, senior director of global corporate communications and CSR, told Ragan that most communicators lose budget conversations before the numbers ever appear.

"If we start the conversation from a position of defense, defending our spending and trying to prove our value, I think we're simply having the wrong conversation," Goodfellow said. "We need to shift from defending budget and justifying our spend to talking about investing in what matters for the business, and in what matters for leaders and employees."

For Goodfellow, framing communications as an investment means tying activities like a newsletter refresh or an intranet overhaul to the organization's larger purpose. "You need to be able to articulate your purpose, both the company's purpose and the function's purpose," he said. "For instance, at Colgate-Palmolive, our purpose is to reimagine a healthier future for all people, their pets and our planet. When you can articulate your why clearly, it helps you justify the recommendations you make down the line."

What did the leader interviews reveal?

Goodfellow's team asked executives a single open question: "When you think of the corporate communications practice at Colgate-Palmolive, what are the things that matter the most to you?" Four themes came back repeatedly:

• Safeguarding the company's reputation
• Keeping employees highly engaged
• Proving that community impact work delivers real impact
• Driving business outcomes, not just outputs like impressions

The team then ran deep research into what drives Colgate-Palmolive's reputation internally and externally, followed by an audit of everything the comms function was already doing. That audit asks two blunt questions of every program.

"Are there things you've been doing for the last however many years that simply don't align to your purpose, that are just things we do to do them?" Goodfellow told Ragan. "Are there things that give us interesting output metrics like impressions or clicks, but don't give us any outcome metrics, like a change in sentiment or someone taking an action as a result of the communication? I don't think you can go and make budget requests well without this foundation."

Which partners should comms recruit early?

Finance belongs near the top of the list, Goodfellow said. "My experience is finance wants us to be successful," he said. "They're accountable for how the money at the company is being invested. If you include your finance partners early, share your strategy and what you're trying to achieve, they become invested in your success, because then they can feel proud of the results too."

The intranet shows the method in practice. Colgate-Palmolive's old intranet was mostly a static page of links and not mobile friendly, which shut out the frontline employees who make up half of its workforce. "We partnered with IT on an RFP for a new intranet that would future-proof our tech stack," Goodfellow said. "They were the ones who funded it, but we were their key client, and now we have a mobile-first intranet that includes frontline employees in 45 manufacturing facilities on five continents."

What is Goodfellow's core budget advice?

He recalled a tactic from his time in Colgate-Palmolive's marketing department. "Rather than showing how tactics lead to an outcome, start with the outcome in mind first," he said. "Understand your business strategy and your purpose, then work your way backwards from there. Don't start from a place of, 'Here's everything we always do, and now let me tell you their value and how they help.'"

Goodfellow will present his full playbook at Ragan's Future of Communications Conference in Austin next month. For communications teams facing flat budgets, the message is direct: start with purpose, audit what you already run, and bring finance in before the ask.