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Matt is RSSB’s Head of Engagement

What does your role look like, day to day?

I lead the team responsible for building relationships with our members and stakeholders. We want to know the key challenges facing our members and the wider rail industry, and we want to connect people with the right experts and solutions at RSSB. That means enabling our engagement experts, as well as others in my team and the wider business, with the right vision, strategy, and plan. 

The goal is for people to understand who we are, what we do, and how we can help. On any given day, I could be supporting the team on our member engagement, public affairs, or groups and committees work.

What brought you to RSSB?

RSSB encompasses two of my biggest passions: public relations and railways. As a Chartered PR Practitioner with 25 years’ experience in communications and engagement, I find it’s an honour to be able to listen to rail leaders and boardrooms about their challenges and talk about how we can help them. 

Railways have been a constant for me. I grew up in a town where rolling stock manufacture was one of the major employers and where one of the country’s major heritage railways is located. Also, my great-grandfather was a steam locomotive fireman for LNER.

How can you help RSSB members?

We have a huge range of tools and services available to members, but it can be difficult to know where to start. We can help members tap into these benefits and get genuine value by making their lives easier, improving performance, and reducing cost to their organisations. Of course, we’re better known for our core safety and standards offer, but there’s a whole lot more besides, which may interest anyone in engineering, operations, projects, people, or even finance. 

Our Engagement and Stakeholder managers can help members on a one-to-one basis, and our industry groups team can enable collaboration, support dialogue, and join members up in a dynamic support network.

Is there anything else you’d like members to know?

The most common thing we hear from members when they discover one of our products or resources is ‘we didn’t know you did that’. Scanning our offerings can be time consuming, and we know there’s a lot to go through and very little time. 

Make sure you’re signed up to all our relevant email updates. And please, pick up the phone, or drop us an email, and talk to any of us. We want to hear from you. Whatever problem or challenge you’re facing, there might be something we can do to help, and if we can’t, we may be able to point you to others who can.