This post actually appeared in the form of an advice sheet on my old web site. It makes more sense with the new site to include it as a blog post instead.

A strategy is a plan of action. It shows how you plan to get from where you are to where you want to be. It takes into account how you think the situation will change, where challenges will come in and how you will address them.

You probably have an overarching strategy (perhaps called your Business Plan or Corporate Plan) which sets out where the organisation is heading over the next few years.

Your Communications Strategy will show how communications will help the organisation achieve the aims set out in the Business Plan. It will ensure that you put resources into the areas that will bring most benefit and it will mean that everyone in the organisation contributes to delivering your overall aims.

I refer to this overarching as the Business Plan through the rest of the document.

A good communications strategy should be concise, clear and easy to understand. It is perfectly realistic for the communications strategy of a reasonably sized organisation to be a two-page document.

It should identify the key message or messages for the organisation. At the simplest level the key message is the thing you want to ram home to customers, staff, volunteers and other stakeholders. It should be a distilled version of what you are seeking to achieve with your Business Plan. Communications effort should be put into activities that deliver the key

messages. Other activities, no matter how important they seem to the people delivering them, should not be heavily resourced in terms of communications.

It should show how performance against the strategy will be measured.

The overall measure of success must be the same measures that are used in the Business Plan: because the Communications Strategy exists to deliver the Business Plan.

A good proxy measure will be Opportunities to View Key Messages.

It should show what style and quality is expected from communications. This should flow from the Business Plan and reflect the values of the organisation.

It will probably point people towards a much more detailed style guide.

It should also show who has responsibility for the implementation of the strategy, who will take the ultimate decisions about resource allocation and what the role of managers and communications staff will be.

Just follow these simple steps.

1) Ensure that the organisation has a Business Plan which sets out the overall

direction for the organisation. Ideally the measures of success in this plan will be outcome based (in effect they will be based on customers, clients or others

changing their behaviour).

2) Identify the stakeholders of your organisation and the Business Plan. Many people hate the term stakeholder and see it as meaningless jargon but in Public Relations terms a stakeholder has a specific meaning: an individual, group or organisation that has an interest in common with you.

3) Consider the key stakeholders: typically customers, competitors, regulators, shareholders etc and think about your key messages. What are the most effective ways of making sure that they understand what you are

trying to do as an organisation? It might be that writing directly to them, inviting them to lunch or making sure that appropriate stories appear in the Daily Telegraph are the most effective ways of getting your key messages across to these stakeholders.

What are the most effective ways of making sure that you understand what these key stakeholders are thinking and planning. It might be that monitoring ‘blogs, reading the trade press or using your customer services function are the most effective way of tracking what stakeholders are up to.

4) Your strategy is simply to put your resources in the areas identified in item 3 above.

An effective Communication Strategy relies on the most senior decision makers understanding and supporting what it is trying to achieve. If the Chief Executive thinks that the job of PR is just to tell people how great the organisation is then they are not going to be very supportive of a strategy that doesn’t put a lot of resources into issuing press releases.

Senior managers have to be clear about what they want to achieve and they have to have faith in the advice they get from their communications people and the organisation as a whole has to understand what this strategy is supposed to do for them.

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