Super Simple Communications Strategy Template

Kestrel Copy Jan 2016

Super Simple Communications Strategy Template

Aims

What do you want to achieve? Keep this brief and specific.

Objectives

How will you know (and how will you prove) that you achieved your aims?

Make sure your objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timebound) and closely related to your organisational objectives.

Environment

Take a look around. What is going on in the external and internal environment that might affect your aims?

• SWOT analysis (it's usually easiest to start filling in Opportunities and Threats, the outward-facing ones)

Strengths: / Weaknesses:
Opportunities: / Threats:

• PESTLE analysis – consider the current issues and trends in each area which may affect you

Political: / Economic:
Social: / Technological:
Legal: / Environmental:

• Competitor analysis – what are other organisations in your field up to?

Organisation name / Common ground in comms approach / Difference / Comparative strengths / Comparative weaknesses

• Calendar – are there any important dates which might influence your communications activities or major deadlines to be aware of?

• Resources – what cash, assets, and staff or volunteer time have you got? Don't let this hem you in too much, as you may be able to source more funding or extra support if you hit on a particularly brilliant tactic.

Channels

List out all the different communications channels you have access to. It's helpful to make quite a detailed list as most comms people have a few areas of particular interest and it's easy to neglect the rest.

Channel / Type (earned, owned or paid?) / New or established?*

* For example you might have been placing stories on local radio for years but only just be getting started with Facebook, or vice versa. Whatever the channel you can't build the right audience, relationships, knowledge or skills overnight.

Audiences

Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to do / think / feel?

Be as specific as you can, don't just say 'the general public'. Make as long a list as you need, but then choose a top three, the most important audiences for achieving your objectives.

It might be useful to plot them on a stakeholder mapping square like this one:

Key messages

What do you want to say? Choose short, simple, messages which represent the most important things that your audience need to know / feel / believe for you to achieve your objectives.

You may have different key messages for each of your three audiences, but try not to make too many otherwise they will become unwieldy. Each key message should be no more than a sentence or two.

Methods / Tactics

Bring objectives, audiences, messages, and communications channels together, perhaps in a grid. In order to achieve this objective, which audience should we target? Which messages should we highlight? Which channels should we use? It's likely that you will have several audiences, messages and channels for each objective.

Objective / Audiences / Messages / Channels

This should give you a strong foundation for your workplan, and help you decide what to do (and, crucially, what not to do), who will do it, and when.

I'd recommend keeping your workplan in a separate document as it's likely to change more frequently and go into much more detail than your strategy.

Evaluation

When will you evaluate the success of your strategy? Think about setting some milestones. And how will you evaluate it? By starting with measurable objectives you're halfway there already.

Good luck!