How To Write A Strategic Communications Plan – Developing a communication strategy and formalizing it in a written plan is a challenge, but it is worth every little bit of time and energy investment it takes. A well-executed, well-aligned strategy and resulting messaging platform will get everyone within your organization on the same page about how to communicate your company’s mission statement, and why and how you do what you do.
In this article, you’ll find tips and examples from PR CEOs, a step-by-step guide to putting together your own plan, and plenty of templates — including a nine-step strategic communications plan template and crisis communications planning template — and resources. additional information to help you create a communication strategy to navigate a more successful future.
How To Write A Strategic Communications Plan
A communication strategy clearly identifies the goals and processes of your organization’s outreach activities. It covers what the organization needs to share with whom to share and their goals. Formalized as a written plan, it is an important part of daily operations. It frames media activities, including both external and internal communications, defining priorities, timelines, target audiences, staff duties, and resources.
How To Create A Project Management Communication Plan
Developing a communications strategy is a complex undertaking with many moving parts. PR professionals like John Raffetto and Dianna Booher understand best practices and exactly what goes into creating and executing an effective communications strategy.
John Raffetto is the CEO and co-founder of RH Strategic, a PR firm based in Seattle and Washington, D.C. specializing in technology, security, healthcare, and public sector markets. John got his start in PR through the US Senate, where he served as press secretary and communications director. In 2000, he began consulting with technology companies, and moved to Seattle in 2004 with Infotech Strategies to open a West Coast office. He started RH Strategic in 2007 with David Herman.
Dianna Booher, CEO of Booher Research, is the best-selling author of 47 books, including her latest: Communicating Like a Leader: Connecting Strategically to Coach, Inspire, and Get Things Done. He works with organizations to help them communicate clearly with their leaders to expand their influence by fostering a strong executive presence.
We asked Raffetto how he begins his planning process. “At RH Strategic we start all strategic planning with the question,
How To Write A Strategic Communications Plan: 8 Steps
This reveals the highest goals and helps us layer in a communication plan that is 100 percent aligned with where the leadership is taking the company,” says Raffetto. “Then we develop three or four communication plan goals, and then we align every tactic — whether it’s a speaker placement, event, media campaign or influencer engagement initiative — with one or more of these goals.”
Meanwhile, Booher has an eight-step process he uses to develop a communications strategy plan for a specific client, company, or event:
There is no single way to create a plan since, as Raffetto notes, you must customize it to your organization, goals, environment and situation, and there are different.
Booher agrees, and says, “Every situation is different. So I don’t regularly use any particular model all the time. But I have patterns that I use when I identify similar problems.”
Strategic Communications Services
Here are three general types of plans that any for-profit or non-profit organization can create to meet either long-term or short-term goals:
If you have not completed a marketing communications strategy, you will need to do so before starting your communications strategy plan. This free annual marketing plan template can help you get started. Simply download the template and you can adjust it to reflect the necessary elements of your individual marketing plan. It includes campaign types, project goals, target audiences, response rates broken down into sections for national and local efforts, content marketing, online marketing, media relations, public relations, trade shows and events, sales campaigns, and branding efforts. Objectives are clearly identified along with total costs and target markets. At the top of the template, you can define monthly sales goals and in the lower section of the template you will find a place to record marketing effectiveness metrics.
Booher adds, “If delegating responsibilities is a problem, I use this 15-item delegation checklist to help the manager handle it.
There are several benefits to having a formal written communication strategy plan for any organization (government agencies, consumer brands, charities, and universities) and the teams within it. Here are some:
Effective Project Communication Plan Template: Teamgantt
RH Strategic has a client that has developed a game-like technology to help children learn math. It is incredibly powerful in that it ‘learns the student’ and personalizes lessons to each student’s learning style. As a result, it closes the gap in math achievement. Teachers and students love it, but not everyone in education is aware of it or understands the opportunities it offers.
RH Strategic was retained to build a PR strategy to change that. We spent a full day with several executives and a whiteboard to map the company’s future and develop their larger communications goals. change conventional thinking in the market. Knowing this, we built a plan that mixed intense, month-to-month media contact with media coverage and speaker placement and social media links to drive toward both goals.
Recently, the CEO was featured in the New York Times Corner Office column as a thought leader – an article that not only reached millions directly, but was also shared multiple times on social media and spawned many other media and request to speak. In parallel, our team was also busy promoting the brand and the product to the trade education press and local media. As part of our original communications strategy, we developed a customer rewards program that drove a tremendous amount of local press coverage for the brand, which tended to attract the attention of neighboring school districts and motivate them to investigate becoming customers. too. Before this effort the company had a lot of visibility in the local press.
Each quarter we took a snapshot of the progress and were pleased to discover that the number and quality of results tied to each strategic goal expanded dramatically from one quarter to the next. This is a classic case of ‘success breeds success’ and demonstrates how a strategic communication program can take a company’s visibility to the next level.
Simple Communication Plan Examples (+ Free Templates) ᐅ Templatelab
Booher provided a case study that illustrates how to strategize a communication plan to change the perceptions of internal stakeholders:
An executive vice president of a large utility company called me with this problem: “I am concerned that the organization may consider outsourcing the work that my division of 2,000 employees currently does. They continue to cut our budget and have a limit limit. But we provide essential services – IT, records management, HR functions. I feel as if I am always on the defense to justify our existence.”
Rather than justify the budget and the number of people involved, I suggest an educational strategy. The VP and his three direct reports admitted that the typical employee in the 50,000+ organization did not even know what function the ‘Administration’ division played.
Consequently, all senior executives agreed on a strategy to educate the entire employee population on what back-office services the division actually provided in order to gain support for keeping those services in-house.
Marketing Communications Plan For A Fintech Company. Case: Rundit Oy
The tactical plan followed. A five-page communication plan with a list of action items to implement the strategy. For example:
In a completely different situation, Booher developed another plan for his client to improve internal and external communication:
The goal was to improve the flow of communication across department lines and improve communication with customers. Here’s how I managed it in a nutshell:
Like a well-built engine, a strategic communications plan has many parts specifically designed to accomplish your goals. While each communication plan should be well customized, there are common, time-tested elements that go into a high performance plan.
Sample Communication Plan
RH Strategic uses proprietary models to track communication strategies. “The Strategic RH team has developed its own models over the years,” says Raffetto. They all include research and discovery where we assess the client’s market landscape and strategic goals; various programs to achieve these goals; and measurement initiatives so that all parties can assess the progress of the strategy at any time and make adjustments. It’s a very simple and logical model, and it’s designed to be useful not just to the communications team, but to the entire executive suite and even the boardroom.”
Next, you will find descriptions of all the components and templates that you can use to develop your own plan.
The mission statement defines the reason why your organization exists and serves as a framework for evaluating current and potential activities. Include your mission statement at the beginning of the communication plan to show that the initiative does not come solely from the communications department or the consultant. Your mission statement should also inform your key messages, which should be short, jargon-free benefit statements.
Here is an example of a message directly from defining a mission. Highfive, a video conferencing company, has a brief mission statement:
Free Marketing Communications Plan Templates
The messages support the mission statement, clearly state the benefits, and the copy is easy to use in any format. Before you start
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