Leading Australian strategic communications agency Sefiani is delighted to announce the appointment of Neeley Williams to the senior role of Associate Director. Neeley also becomes a member of Sefiani’s Senior Leadership Team.

With a stellar career encompassing 15 years’ international communications and public affairs experience across business and political environments, Neeley is a brand and corporate reputation specialist.

Neeley joins Sefiani from global firm Hill + Knowlton (H + K) Strategies where she was Group Account Director and led major client accounts like Salesforce, Twitter, Aon and Equinor across sectors including enterprise technology, professional services, energy, resources, and consumer goods. She also led H+K’s crisis management practice in Australia and was a member of the firm’s APAC Public Affairs team.

Before moving to Australia five years ago, Neeley worked in Brussels for ten years. She was chief adviser to a senior parliamentarian in the heart of European policymaking, leading technical and political negotiations in the European Parliament on international trade agreements. After seven years in that role, she moved to Samsung Electronics as Senior Manager External Affairs and Policy and was a principal member of Samsung’s global risk and reputation team.

Sefiani CEO Robyn Sefiani said, “We are thrilled Neeley is bringing her considerable talent and global experience to Sefiani. Her exceptional skills in managing complex projects requiring stakeholder engagement, public affairs, reputation management, integrated communications and crisis counsel will be much appreciated by our clients. And her wonderful, engaging style fits perfectly with Sefiani’s professional and friendly culture.

“She will also help take Sefiani’s market-leading crisis management offering to new heights by leading crisis drills for clients seeking to be in the best possible position of preparedness for a crisis incident as well as leading media training for crisis scenarios,” she said.

Commenting on her new role Neeley said, “I’m excited to be joining Sefiani, an agency I’ve long admired. When I was considering a career move, there was only one agency in my sights, and that was Sefiani. I’ve long admired Sefiani’s reputation, people, quality of work on challenging assignments and values demonstrated through purposeful work. I can’t wait to get started!”

The new appointment follows four other recent hires at Sefiani to service a rapidly growing client portfolio including recent client additions Airbus, Luno and Ferrero.