Preparing a PR or Communications Strategy
May 18, 2010
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.
Why you need a strategy
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.
What the strategy should look like
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.
How to develop a Communications Strategy
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.
Risks
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.
Shameless marketing
October 13, 2009
STOP PRESS
EXTRA WORKSHOP
If you missed my PR workshop on 28th October, don’t worry. We’ve decided to run another workshop on 2nd December. Same venue, same price. What are you waiting for?
I am running a workshop on media relations for small and micro businesses on 28th October 2009. This is part of a series of workshops on various aspects of marketing organised by the Shropshire Hills Sustainable Business Scheme. The people running the other workshops are a great bunch, honestly, they really know what they’re talking about.
It’s going to be fabulous.
Each workshop costs just £10 per person for South Shropshire Sustainable Business Scheme members or £25 per person for non members, and includes light refreshments.
It’s probably worth noting that it costs £25 to join the Sustainable Business Scheme.
This is the five week programme. You don’t have to sign up to the whole series.
newspapers and magazines – Ben Proctor.
newspapers and magazines. Find out the secrets of the PR industry, learn how to identify a good story, to prepare an impressive press release and to charm journalists into writing about you. We will also look at other benefits that good news stories can bring such as improving customer relations and helping with search engine page rankings. A fun and practical workshop session.
will get you more customers – Anna Wilde
Google AdWords – Helen Mitchell
your results for maximum profit! We’ll look at how to write effective, attractive ads, choose the right phrases to advertise on and how to monitor & optimise your campaign.
Search Engine Optimisation – Helen Mitchell
be looking at how to choose the right keywords to target, how to work them into your website, and how to get other websites to link to yours.
more customers – Karen Thorne
All the workshops start at 1730hrs and finish 1930hrs. the first four are at Long Mynd Hotel (lovely venue) in Church Stretton. The final session will be at a currently un-named venue.
Pre-booking and payment are apparently essential and to do this please contact Alison Scimia, Shropshire Hills AONB Partnership, The Old Post Office, Shrewsbury Road, Craven Arms. SY7 9NZ. Or e-mail Alison.scimia@shropshire.gov.uk
A model to measure strategic communications quality
July 7, 2009
This has been floating around at the back of my mind for sometime and finally I’ve put it down on a piece of paper (or rather on a PDF but it looks quite a lot like paper).
I reckon, that in terms of strategic communications, it is possible to tell a good organisation from a bad one. It is also possible to improve a bad organisation so that it gets better at strategic comms. This model is my first attempt to provide a tool to allow that to be done in a systematic way.
This is how it works. There are five sections. Within each section there are up to five statements or groups of statements with an associated score. If the statement can be said, with evidence, to fairly describe the organisation in question then the associated score should be allocated to the organisation. In each section only one statement should be used to deliver the score.
The scores for each section can then be added. The total score gives a measure of strategic communications quality relative to a theoretical ideal. An organisation meeting the highest quality statement in each section would score 39.
So if you can fairly say:
Our customers understand what we are seeking to achieve and they can explain how we keep them informed/ Our customers also understand how to influence our decisions and they can explain how their views influence our decisions.
Then you can award yourself 10 points
But if the best you can manage is
We provide some information about what we are seeking to achieve but we do not know whether customers understand this. Our customers can’t explain how they influence our decisions.
Then the best you can have is 3 points.
I’ve put a worked example in the PDF which is for a (entirely fictional) IT consultancy which scores 12/39. Then they can use the model to see what improvements would bring the biggest benefit in terms of scores (in the example the board can get better or they can improve customer relations).
Ben and the art of bicycle mechanics
April 23, 2009
Now I’m not a natural cycle mechanic (my father despaired long ago of teaching me to mend a puncture) but I’ve been improving my skills over the past year with the help of some very skilled and experienced colleagues.
One of the key skills all good cycle mechanics have is a careful and methodical approach. I struggle with this. I’m naturally a big picture sort of guy, fizzing with creative energy, making the connections that no-one else has seen, innovating and designing new ways of working. This is all great but it doesn’t fix a bicycle.
After a long period of frustrating sessions in the workshop, going back over work because the shortcut I took meant that I failed to check the state of the ball bearings (or whatever) I believe that I have got it. I can recycle a bicycle nearly as quickly as a skilled mechanic and slow and steady is my watchword. The washers and nuts are placed on the bench in the order they came off so I don’t need to spend fifteen minutes wondering what order they should go back on. No matter how good the gears look, I start from first principles because I have spent too long tweaking only to find that the gear hanger was slightly out.
And it is (sort of) the same in public relations. There are steps to take in planning and developing strategy. It’s tempting to take a shortcut, it’s tempting to jump into the “what are we going to do?” before the “what are we seeking to achieve?”, it’s tempting to assume that this job is special and doesn’t need all the usual rigmarole.
But just as shortcuts in bicycle servicing just lead to even more time spent with a grease gun and a spanner, shortcuts in strategy development lead to more time down the line playing catch up and cursing missed opportunities.
Do it the right way, every time.
The campaign to save coterminous
March 17, 2009
The Local Government Association is banging on about jargon (again) and generating media interest (again) in a campaign calling on Councils to “ban” certain jargon terms. Edward Welsh tweeted to attract the interest of those of us who are interested in such things. He cited beaconicity, exemplar and coterminous as candidates for expunging from the local government lexicon.
Boring, serious bit:
Let us pause to agree that the LGA does well when it generates any coverage for the sector which is not focusing on child protection failures or tax rises.
Let us, further, raise the spectre that the LGA could appear to be patronising its own membership and actually perpetuating a belief that councils are run by a bunch of incompetents.
And then let us move on because that’s all a bit dull.
Back to the jargon:
Who amongst us would seek to preserve “holistic governance” or “predictors of beaconicity”? Let them die I say.
I was distraught to learn that they were seeking to murder “coterminous” which I have always found to be a useful, elegant and unambiguous word. The LGA suggests “singing from the same hymn sheet” and this gets to the heart of what we should really be focusing on.
Coterminous doesn’t mean “singing from the same hymn sheet”. Coterminous means (according to my New Oxford English Dictionary) “having the same boundaries or extent in space, time or meaning”. It can be used to form the question “When the primary care trusts are reorganised, will the trust boundaries be coterminous with district council boundaries?”. Leave it alone and eschew those who use it erroneously*.
But, probably, don’t use it in a letter to year six school children.
When people are using words but they don’t know what they mean, it is pretty clear that the problem isn’t the words.
The problem is a culture which does not value communication skills, which does not encourage people to reflect upon their writing and which does not place a copy of the New Oxford English Dictionary on each and every desk.
The problem is that government should be about this stuff. It should be about communicating, understanding, and engagement (another one for the chop by the way). Instead it is about management and processes and administration and whatever you put in to a sausage machine comes out shaped like a sausage.
So let’s all enjoy the journalists complaining about meaningless council speak and ridiculing faceless bureaucrats but is anyone actually going to address the real problem?
And hands off coterminus.
I may set up a facebook group.
*I’m sure the LGA definition was based on the context in which it was used and it was the people in the councils who didn’t know what it meant.
Do what it says on the can
February 18, 2009
Pardon me while I take the opportunity to blow my own trumpet. I used to work for North Shropshire District Council. When I joined it was considered by the government’s inspectorate to be one of the worst performing councils in the country. When I left it was considered to be one of the best. That was good news but not quite excellent news.
You see, though satisfying the Audit Commission is important, the real measure of success is satisfying the people the Council serves. The measure used across local councils in England is the question “How satisfied are you with the way the local authority runs things”. You can, and I have, criticise this as a measure of customer satisfaction but it has the advantage of being standardised and widely understood.
In 2005 only 46% of the people we served were satisfied with the way we ran things. By 2007 we had moved that to 54%: an eight point increase at a time when satisfaction was tending to decline. We were pleased with the progress but it still compared badly with other district councils (half of the district councils in the country have satisfaction ratings of 55% or above).
I’ve just been sent the satisfaction data for 2008 and now 61% of local residents are satisfied with the way the council runs things. That puts the council into the top band for district councils and means that satisfaction jumped a further 7 points in just one year.
So how did we do this? Well clearly we started providing better services, really good services actually. Councillors became much more confident in making and sticking to decisions. We set up a range of mechanisms to listen to the concerns of local people and businesses and we changed and adapted what we did in response to what they said. We were clear about how we were going to improve people’s lives (and how we weren’t) and we told people what we were up to.
In short we used communications as a tool to improve the business. This is strategic communications. It isn’t rocket science, you should be doing it, it does work and I can prove it.
How not to break projects (I’m talking to you Chief Executive)
January 6, 2009
In my recent predictions for 2009 I suggested that project management leaves something to be desired in parts of the public sector (though public bodies have no monopoly on this). A little while ago I contributed to a magazine piece giving top tips to senior managers (in the private sector as it happens) on delivering successful projects and I’ve adapted those thoughts for the blog.
Agree the framework for project management
What any good project management framework creates is an environment in which everyone involved in the project understands who is responsible, where to find clarity on details, how to flag up risks and so on.
As well as being a CIPR Member, I am a PRINCE2 Practitioner (PRINCE2 is a project management framework) and I strongly recommend using this as your organisation’s framework.
PRINCE2 often has a reputation in organisations where it has been poorly implemented for either being overly bureaucratic or only appropriate for big projects. Neither of these things are true but any project management framework only works where individuals within the organisation are properly trained to use it and everyone keeps to the shared approach. PRINCE2 isn’t the only one but it is the best.
Lead don’t manage
There can only be one project manager and that project manager will be working for you. So do your job not theirs. Make sure they understand what you want, agree the plan, agree the resources and get out of their way.
Manage risk.
Do this openly, encourage every stakeholder to identify risks and then show how (and if) you are going to mitigate the impact. Keep checking and rechecking your risk log. Keep talking.
Focus on outcomes.
Don’t get sucked into the detail. It is easy for the project team to become sidetracked and caught up by problems along the way. They need leaders to be keeping them on track by asking
“How is this going to deliver the benefits we specified for our customers?”
Put your time into the planning phase
With so many demands on time it is very easy to only commit time to a project when things start to go wrong but a commitment to the planning phase will pay dividends for delivery. If you are fully involved in developing the plan then you will be confident in the plan and people will only bother you if a strategic decision needs to be made.
There is a leadership issue here too. There are many reasons to commence a poorly planned project: senior managers want to see a result now, technical teams are keen to play with new technology, time is money and so on. Leaders need to role model the importance of proceeding in a planned manner.
Always consider stopping the project
Nothing ruins delivery like “spec creep”. Every time you are asked to sign off on a exception to the project you need to consider whether the project will still deliver the required outcome or whether a new project is required. Stopping a high profile project because of spec creep would be brave, even risky, but that’s what you get paid for isn’t it?
Ensure communication has a priority within the project.
Poor communication within project teams or between the project and stakeholders is a critical risk. You probably don’t know enough about communications. Your project manager probably doesn’t know enough about communications. Hire someone who does and listen to them.
Clearly as a communications consultant I would say that wouldn’t I? Well yes but that’s because I know what I’m talking about. I often think of a Chief Executive of my acquaintance who, following a robust discussion, declared in exasperation
“Typical. You always think that we should be open and honest”
Indeed.
Invite challenge
You don’t know enough to make the decisions you need to make. You don’t have enough knowledge within your organisation. Honestly. Make sure the plan is challenged by technical experts and customer representatives from outside the project team.
If I had to pick only one
All of these prevail but the greatest of these is “Plan”. Not everything can be foreseen but many things can. Senior managers have more faith in a well-planned project and so meddle less. It is easier to spot a well-planned project going off the rails and to act to correct it. But most importantly a well planned project is likely to deliver what you set out to achieve.
Image is Prince Rupert by Anthony Van Dyck and is public domain. It was intended as a pun on PRINCE2 but actually he was a rather talented milatry commander exhibiting all of the qualities listed above.
Crystal ball gazing
January 5, 2009
Everyone else is at it so why not me.
Here are my five predictions for 2009.
1) Arguments between local authorities and their local partners will break out across the England as they blame each other for the disappointing Comprehensive Area Assessment inspection reports they receive. There will be (as previously discussed) an increase in short-notice or no-notice inspections and inspectorates will be much more cautious about providing positive inspection reports.
2) There will be a general election in June and Labour will be returned to government with a reduced majority. The Prime Minister will want to go to the polls at a time of his choosing rather than waiting until 2010 and being forced to go regardless of the local conditions. To a certain extent the timing will depend on how far the country has slumped into despair but there are European elections in June. A General Election on the same day would enable people to make a protest vote on the MEPs rather than the MPs.
3) There will be an amusing range of rubbish and embarrassing forays onto YouTube from public bodies and sleepy regulated industries. Even the most ancient chief executive is likely to have noticed that Barrack Obama has made use of this Internet thing to get elected and will decree that they should commission cool corporate videos likewise. Sadly for them social media only works on its own terms.
4) Millions of pounds of public investment will be wasted as infrastructure schemes are rushed and poorly planned. The government is very keen to be a bit Keynesian by releasing public money into capital works across the country. Local councillors, health authority chiefs and even fire bosses will be dusting off those projects that every organisation has floating about in the back office obligingly. Sadly the bulk of the public sector has still not learned to plan projects properly or to listen to stakeholders and respond to their views before kicking off.
5) Facebook will rule the world. OK maybe not rule the world but it will integrate itself into a huge number of web sites and will become useful not just for social networking but for practical purposes as web designers (and corporate comms managers) realise the implications of Facebook connect. Twitter will continue to be huge in the blogosphere (and in the twitterverse of course) but it will remain a technology in search of a purpose.
Check back in a year’s time to see how I did. Though frankly if I get any of it right you’ll hear about it a great deal sooner than then.
Danger Will Robinson…
October 22, 2008
The Government is going to be handing out computers and broadband to ensure that the poorest children will have access to the internet at home. Now a pilot in Oldham and Suffolk and next year a national roll-out.
Good stuff no?
Maybe, maybe not, but this is a PR Strategy blog not a social policy blog and Home Access (for thus is it known) is a PR disaster waiting to happen. This programme might well succeed but be seen to fail and, thanks to the magic of the internet, we can watch it do so in real time.
But why so gloomy? Well let us consider the risk factors:
- The government task force that triggered all this said that everyone aged 5-19 should have internet access at home by 2011. Government targets are excellent tools for opposition politicians and pressure groups to beat ministers over the head with and this will start long before the deadline.
- The task force recommendations are based on seeing “market failure”. Usually there is a reason the market fails and, some will say, the government is not best placed to fill the gap.
- It’s almost certainly too late. The announcement of the programme contained this quote from Jim Knight “A computer with internet access is now as essential as a pen and paper in modern learning”. By the time government has worked out that something is vital, almost by definition, the world will have moved on. By 2011 the digital divide will be in mobile internet not fixed line.
- There are lots of organisations involved in delivery. The sponsoring department DCSF has charged government agency becta with delivery which in turn will be working with local authorities and a range of suppliers. How much opportunity for communication failures and juicy stories for Watchdog.
- Government and ICT procurement always works well doesn’t it?
- The whole purpose is to use the technology to improve learning. Hands up if you think the average teenager may also want to use it to explore the Pirate Bay or worse. I foresee accounts being suspended under fair use and many grumpy parents in the local paper. And that’s assuming that the net nanny and security software is up to the mark.
What can be done about this?
Three key things:
- Communications within the programme must be well resourced and top-notch. Everyone involved has to understand what’s going on, what is being achieved and has to be able to flag up problems and get them resolved quickly.
- Media scanning is going to be crucial. Programme communicators have to find every rumour and deal with it before it gets out of hand across England. Actually local authorities could be a strength with this because they tend to have their ears close to the ground. The LGA has got much better at using in-house comms staff to monitor the local angles of national stories so let’s bring them in nice and early. Specialist support to help with the tech media and blogosphere would be a must.
- The programme must work, flawlessly, in every respect. That means excellent project management and really strong challenge of everything before it is agreed. Comms staff (and others but it’s usually the comms staff) have to be asking “but what if…” for every tiny aspect of the programme. I know it doesn’t seem like it but it actually is possible to deliver complex projects on-time, in budget and meeting outcomes.
I know little of becta but I hope they have some smart comms support and senior managers who understand the importance of PR.
When simple and direct is best
October 19, 2008
A while ago I was called in to advise a charity. A long-standing arrangement with a neighbouring charity not to fundraise on each other’s patches had broken down and they wanted a communication strategy to help resolve the situation. Managers were quite hurt because working relations between the organisations had, historically, been very strong.
Early on in our discussions it transpired that, as a result of the dispute, the two charities had stopped talking to one another. We came up with a plan involving media relations, the engagement of third-parties and so-on. And ultimately it was successful.
The crux of the plan was extremely simple. It was to keep talking to the charity. We made sure that our chief executive phoned their chief executive every week to explain what actions we felt forced into taking next and to ask them, once again, to think again.
Without this weekly call I don’t think we would have succeeded. Always remember the simple things.
I was reminded of this when I received an unsolicited e-mail from a singer-songwriter called Douglas. I’ve never seen him live. I’ve never bought an album. I’d never visited his mySpace page.
What he had done was browse blogger profiles and on mine I list folk and alt.country music as interests. His e-mail just suggested that if I like folk and alt.county I might like his music. Which I do.
And for the price of a moment to send an e-mail he gets this link to his mySpace page and, who knows, I may buy an album.
So when you’re developing your next campaign I’d like you to remember Douglas. Be creative, think outside the box, shape the conversation and position your client. And then ask yourself “should we just write to someone?”
Image is “Talking with the boss” by Stuart Seeger licensed under CC-A-2.0
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