This is the sixth in a series of posts exploring how to create a good communications plan. Last time around we moved from analysis to planning and looked at setting your objectives. This post looks at establishing your strategy.

Now that you’ve figured out the objectives for your communications plan, you know where you’re going. It’s time to figure out how to get there.

Your strategy defines how you will achieve the objectives you’ve just identified. If you’ve done your analysis and thought through your objectives properly, the strategy should flow smoothly from them. If it doesn’t, you may need to go back and think a little more carefully about the sections that went before.

What Your Strategy Should Include

Profile

Start by thinking about your general approach to the initiative. Do you want to generate the maximum coverage possible or are you trying to minimize it? Simply put, do you want this to be high-profile or low-profile?

Proactive Or Reactive?

You will often find that a high-profile approach goes hand-in-hand with being proactive, and vice-versa. However, that isn’t necessarily the case. Think – do you want to go out and drive the issue, or do you want to wait for customers and the media to come to you?

Stakeholders

Bearing in mind the stakeholders you’ve already identified, in a general sense, how should you go about reaching them? Will you reach out to as many as possible or just the key ones? Will you communicate with them directly, through the media or perhaps through your website?

Considerations

Link to your objectives

You just spent time nailing down the objectives for your initiative. Don’t waste that effort. Make sure your strategy fits with where you want to go.

Link to your analysis

Along the same lines as the point above, your strategy needs to fit with your earlier analysis. The easiest way to make sure it does is to draw clear, distinct lines between the two.

Don’t confuse strategy and tactics

This is a common mistake and it’s easy to make. Remember: strategy and tactics are different things. Don’t get down to the level of exactly what you’re going to issue/produce/hold at this point.

Remember, though, that while strategy and tactics are different, they are closely related – the strategy helps to frame your future decisions, including those about tactics. The choices you make about your strategy now will have a decisive impact on those you make about your tactics later.

Conclusion

The strategy section of your plan really isn’t brain surgery. You know what you’re trying to achieve; the strategy is just a top-level map of how you’re going to get there.

The “Communications Plan” Series

This is the sixth in a series of posts on communications planning. To read more of the series, check out a summary of the posts so far or pick from the previous posts:

• Part 1 – An Overview
• Part 2 – Context
• Part 3 – Environmental Scan
• Part 4 – Stakeholder Analysis
• Part 5 – Objectives

(Image credit: aleazzurro)

This is the fourth in a series of posts exploring how to create a good communications plan.

Last time we examined how to paint the broader picture through your environmental scan. This time we’ll look at your stakeholder analysis.

Stakeholder Analysis

This is the last of your initial ‘setting the stage’ sections. You’ve already looked at the context for what you’re doing and the broader environment it fits within. Now it’s time to consider the people and organizations that have a stake in your initiative.

An important note: For the sake of simplicity I’ve had to put these three posts in a specific order. In reality you may put them together concurrently, and there’s often overlap between them. For example, stakeholders may crop up frequently in your environmental scan. That’s fine. What’s important is that you think through all of these areas so you don’t overlook something that may come back to bite you later.

While your entire comm plan should flow logically and clearly link sections, your stakeholder analysis in particular will link to numerous other parts of your communications plan. Bear this in mind now, and refer back to this section frequently when working on later parts of the plan.

Your stakeholder analysis should cover everyone who’s truly affected by your initiative. Here are a few things to consider:

• What are the positions of each stakeholder on this initiative?
• How do you expect each stakeholder to react to what you’re doing
• Look at your previous experiences with each stakeholder
• Do you expect them to be outspoken?
• Might they express their concerns privately or are they more likely to use the media?
• How might you use the support of those you expect to react positively?
• Attendance at a potential media event?
• Supportive quote in media materials?
• Local angle on the announcement?
• How can you mitigate the concerns of those you expect to react negatively?
• Can you brief them in advance?
• Can you consult with them on what you’re doing before announcing it widely?
• How will you respond to their concerns if you can’t mitigate them?

The most common gap I’ve seen in communications plans is a failure to identify potential negative reactions. The “ostrich approach” rarely works. You’re not doing anyone favours by pretending people won’t react negatively when you expect them to do so.

You’ll often find that for a given initiative, in the public sector anyway, a small percentage of stakeholders will be highly supportive and a small percentage will be ardently critical. If you picture reactions on a continuum, they’re the groups at either end. There’s not much you can do to change their opinions. The stakeholders you want to influence are in the middle.

More than most parts of my experience, the stakeholder analysis is very much framed by my public sector work. How do you approach this part of your planning process? Is this completely different on the agency side or the private sector?

The “Communications Plan” Series

This is the fourth in a series of posts on communications planning. To read more of the series, check out a summary of the posts so far or pick from the previous posts:

• Part 1 – An Overview
• Part 2 – Context
• Part 3 – Environmental Scan

This is the third in a series of posts exploring how to create a good communications plan.

Over the next few weeks we’ll take detailed look at each of the sections in a communications plan. Each time I’ll give my perspective and ask what you think. My aim is for us to work together to fill the gaps in what we know. Hopefully we’ll all learn from each other.

Last time we took a look at setting the scene through the plan’s context. This time we’re moving on to your environmental scan.

Environmental Scan

While your context section is about looking at what you’re doing and setting the scene, your environmental scan is about looking externally at what other people are doing and saying.

The environmental scan is more than just a media scan, although that is a major part of it. You need to go beyond just the media to look at the broader environment and how you fit into it.

If you’ve ever studied business, a PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) analysis is a useful way to begin to wrap your head around things. Don’t stick rigidly to this format, though.

Here are a few things to consider:

• What have your competitors done recently?
• What have your competitors done in relation to this?
• What’s the legislative context?
• What are other jurisdictions doing? (This is especially important if this is a comm plan for within the public sector)
• What has the mainstream media said about this?
• Which outlets (and journalists) have written about this?
• What tone did they take? Positive or negative?
• What’s being said online?
• Who are the influential writers online on this topic?
• How have they approached the issue?
• What economic factors come into play?
• What (if any) upcoming events/special dates might relate to this?

Don’t fill this section with long-winded quotes from articles – summarize the gist of what they said. Page upon page of quotes doesn’t help anyone. Be brief and to the point.

What do you think?

What’s above is based on my experience, which is primarily in the public sector. What about the private sector? What about the agency side? Would you approach this differently?

How do you approach this part of your planning process?

Let me know in the comments.

The “Communications Plan” Series

This is the third in a series of posts on communications planning. To read more of the series, check out a summary of the posts so far or pick from the previous posts:

• Part 1 – An Overview
• Part 2 – Context

(photo credit: kusito)

This is the second in a series of posts exploring how to create a good communications plan.

Over the next few weeks we’ll take detailed look at each of the sections in a communications plan. Each time I’ll give my perspective and ask what you think. My aim is for us to work together to fill the gaps in what we know. Hopefully we’ll all learn from each other.

Last time around we looked at the overall plan and its content. This time we’re getting down into the details.

Context

The first section of a communications plan I work on is the context. Why? Because it forces you to do two things:

• Boil what’s going on down to a succinct summary
• Focus on the topic on which you’re about to write a plan.

The “context” section of your plan focuses on setting the scene. This isn’t about details of an announcement – heck, you haven’t reached the part where you decide what your communications objectives or strategy will be yet. This is about the background to your initiative.

This should be a relatively easy part of your plan to write. If you know the subject this can pretty much write itself. If you don’t, you need to bring yourself up to speed. To write the context section, you need to know exactly what’s going on.

A side effect of doing this first is that you can’t launch into the other aspects of the plan without doing your background research.

Here are a few things to think about when you think about the context for your initiative. Note that they have an internal focus:

• What is the initiative about?
• What related announcements have you made?
• What are the timelines?
  • Is there an upcoming product launch/conference/deadline, etc?
  • Are there any notable milestones?
• Who is involved?
  • Who within your organization has a stake in this?
  • What other organizations are a part of this?
    • Do you have partners in the initiative?
    • Note: This isn’t a stakeholder list – that comes later.

Over To You

You now have my thoughts on what to include in the first section of a communications plan. But what do you think about this?

What’s above is based on my experience, which is primarily in the public sector. What about the private sector? What about the agency side? Would you approach this differently?

Let me know in the comments.

The “Communications Plan” Series

This is the second in a series of posts on communications planning. To read more of the series, check out a summary of the posts so far or pick from the previous posts:

• Part 1 – An Overview

(photo credit: bookgrl)

Update: I have now completed this communications planning series and have republished all of the posts as a free strategic communications Planning eBook.

Is there such a thing as an ideal communications plan template? What would it look like?

I’ve spent most of the last few years surrounded by communications and marketing plans (comm plans, for short).

I studied them at university, proposing (what I thought were) reasoned solutions to other peoples’ problems. I then joined government and spent a lot of time reading other peoples’ quality assessments and edits on plans and learning from them – what worked, what didn’t work, where the common gaps were and what the essential information was.

Eventually I found myself in a position where I had the opportunity to provide input on comm plans myself. I even helped to develop training on communications planning. Nowadays I’m on the assembly line, writing plans and executing them.

This variety of positions has given me an interesting perspective on what a communications plan should look like. It’s very much clouded by my government experience though, so I’d love to hear from folks on the agency or corporate side (government folks please feel free to chime in too!).

This is the first in what will be a series of posts over time. This one focuses on the top-level overall content of a communications plan.

Together, over the coming weeks we’ll take a more detailed look at each of these sections in turn. At each step of the way I’ll give my perspective and ask what you think – what you agree with… what I’m missing… where I’m way off the mark. Hopefully we’ll all learn from each other.

Content of a Communications Plan

Let’s start by looking at the general sections of a comm plan. Here’s what I’ve used when planning a communications initiative, in roughly the order I approach them. Not all of them are always necessary – this is the broad list:

• Context - what’s happened before? What’s the history?
• Environmental Scan – what are the key factors that will affect your success?W hat is the media saying?
• Stakeholders – your stakeholders and their expected reactions. How you will manage them?
• Objectives - what do you want to achieve? (should be clear, relevant, measurable… use the SMART approach if you like)
• Strategy – where are you going, and why?
• Audiences – who are the key audiences?
• Announcement – given the strategy, are you making an announcement? What are you announcing?
• Messages – what are you saying about the announcement?
• Tactics – how will you implement your strategy, both before, during and after the main announcement (assuming you have one)?
• Issues – what problems may you have to overcome?
• Budget – what will it cost?
• Evaluation – how will you know if you’ve been successful?

So, what do you think? Have I missed areas? Are some irrelevant? In the right order?

What do you look at when you write a communications plan?

(photo credit: tomswift46)