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FROM STRATEGY TO ANNUAL ACTION PLANS
by Diane Gayeski, Ph.D.
The key to excellent communication is creating the right infrastructure-the expertise, the staffing and funding structure, the understanding of your communication channels and constituent needs, and your overall communication philosophy and standards that will support individual communication efforts. These give you the resources and the guidelines necessary to decide what good communication looks like, which projects deserve priority, and how to communicate a consistent organizational voice.
Although problems and opportunities that require a communication intervention will arise unexpectedly, it’s a good idea to create at least a one-year communication plan that will serve as a guide to content for various media channels, meetings and publications. This will also help you allocate staff and budget. To create an annual plan, it’s necessary to first understand your organization’s current strategic direction and plans. For example, if your company is planning to acquire one of its competitors, or to introduce a new benefits program, you will need to decide how those actions break down to key messages for each audience. It’s also necessary to understand more subtle and overarching goals and themes that will guide your organization’s growth. For instance, the business may require a new focus on innovation and new product development, or more emphasis on building the company’s reputation in the community and with local government. Knowing this, you can emphasize certain themes or seek out stories that highlight ways to reach those goals.
There are four major stages in developing an annual plan:
1. Review your organization’s current strategy and your environmental analysis. Ideally, the communication manager has a “seat at the table” in leadership meetings where problems, opportunities and strategies are developed. You should check in with key executives to capture their priorities for the coming year.
2. Set specific objectives for each constituency or audience. Rather than starting out thinking of communication products or messages, decide on some specific business results that you would like to achieve.
3. Design key messages and decide on the proper communication channel(s) for each.
4. Create a calendar of communication events and products, and fill in messages and stories for each.
From Managing the Communication Function: A Blueprint for Organizational Success, second edition, by Diane Gayeski, Ph.D., now available through the IABC Knowledge Centre. Member price: US$199 (PDF – US$149); non-member price: US$299 (PDF – US$223.50).
Manage your professional development
As a communicator, you’ve acquired a portfolio of skills and abilities that you use successfully in your current job or projects. However, the job or projects you are working on today may not be what you will be working on in five years. Most of us will have multiple jobs or specialties throughout our careers.
Given that you want to progress, challenge yourself professionally and achieve your goals, you must manage this portfolio to ensure it is current, practical and useful throughout your career. The following are six steps to help you direct your professional development.
1. Expand your base of knowledge.
The greater your level of knowledge and abilities, the more options you have. Avail yourself of new opportunities and career directions by acquiring multiple skills and playing multiple roles. While it’s important to be an effective generalist communicator, it’s equally important to develop at least one or two specialties for greater flexibility and leverage. You will limit your opportunities if you confine yourself to a single specialty or industry niche.
Find out what expertise and skills are in demand now—and what will be in demand in the future. Identify trends that are influencing the need for certain expertise. Study how the communication sector is evolving. Find out what work your colleagues are doing that interests you.
Try to acquire, every year, at least one new area of expertise that is important to your career.
2. Create a professional development plan.
To manage your career effectively, you need to manage your professional development.
This means identifying your current areas of expertise and ability, determining what you need to improve or expand, and developing an action plan to do so. The following chart can help you prioritize this process:
List your career goals for the next few years. To help you get started, refer to the business and personal goals you identified in Chapter : How Do I Create a Business Plan?
Identify the skills, knowledge and experience required to achieve these goals.
Identify the gaps between where you are now and where you want to go.
Determine the actions you must take to acquire or improve this expertise. At this point, it’s helpful to know and apply your learning style so you can create a plan that will appeal to you and be easier to follow. For example, if you learn best by reading, your action plan might include reading books on how to manage databases. If you learn better by doing, you might want to take a course on database management.
Set deadlines and add these to your time schedule or “to do” list.
If you are having difficulty creating this plan, you may find the assistance of a professional career counselor helpful. Ask your communication colleagues for recommendations.
Once you have created your professional development plan, be sure to evaluate your progress in achieving your goals on a regular basis. Most important, keep going.
3. Market your expertise.
When you develop new expertise, you should advise the people who can benefit from this. Inform your clients and colleagues, and communicate the ways in which your abilities can help to meet their needs.
4. Stay current.
You need to stay current not only with developments related to your areas of specialization and the field of communication, but also with the marketplace and the world generally. What’s happening near you and around you affects your business and your clients. You need to filter this information in the context of your career and the work you do for others.
Tune in. Look, listen, read, ask and talk about business, social, economic, religious, cultural and political developments.
5. Reward yourself.
Professional development is a personal pursuit, therefore you won’t be receiving accolades from others. The ability to derive satisfaction from your accomplishments is an important survival skill for consultants.
You need to nourish and reward yourself. Celebrate your own successes. When you reach a goal in your professional development plan, give yourself a pat on the back by doing something special for yourself.
6. Pursue new opportunities.
If you lose your primary clients tomorrow, you need to be able to replace them—fast.
You must be prepared for new challenges, people and situations.
Pursue opportunities that take you beyond your “comfort zone.” Stretch yourself to change, to try new areas of work. Don’t allow lack of experience to hold you back. Integrate new competencies into your professional development plan. Never stop learning.
This article is an excerpt from The Successful Communication Consultant by Corinne LaBossiere, ABC, APR, available from the IABC Knowledge Centre.
What does a communication plan look like?
by Les Potter, ABC
A communication plan looks very much like a strategic plan or a marketing plan. Remember, to be called strategic, it must share some of the same elements and methodology of accepted planning formats.
My model for a strategic communication plan contains the following sections:
1. Executive summary.
2. The communication process (a description for instructional purposes). Not all decision makers are trained in communication, PR or integrated marketing communication. This section builds the business case for using communication as a strategic management tool. Omit it if your decision makers get it. From my experience, few do.
3. Background. How did you get to where you are today? What are the major milestones in the organization’s history? What has led the organization to its current situation?
4. Situation analysis. This includes an analysis of current issues—problems and opportunities— plus an analysis of publics/stakeholders/audiences. This is your research component. Included should be a SWOT analysis, a strategic planning tool that documents strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats the organization faces both now and in the future.
5. Strategic summary. In this section, you set goals and objectives—the expected outcomes of your communication activities—and formulate your message strategy for each public/stakeholder.
6. Schedule. This section documents the implementation of your tactics, your specific communication tools and activities that touch each stakeholder.
7. Budget. Enough said.
8. Monitoring and evaluation. This section documents how you will monitor implementation and measure success in achieving goals and objectives.
This eight-step model is ideal for an annual communication plan or for a shorter duration plan that deals with a specific issue, such as planning a major trade show or a nonprofit’s annual fundraising event. It also works quite well for a plan containing internal, external and other components, such as some advertising/promotional tactics or community relations activities. The planning model works equally well for internal communication.
In the reality of day-to-day use, you will probably use many of these steps in combination, without using the complete model step for step. That’s okay. The beauty of strategic thinking is just that—you think strategically, that is, you know the purpose of your organization; you examine the environments in which your organization operates and the issues it faces; and through this systematic analysis, synthesis and evaluation, you develop a plan of communication action to help the organization achieve its mission. You may frequently use only five elements—issues, publics/audiences/stakeholders, message, media and evaluation—in counseling and advising the people you support. If you use them in that order, you are still practicing strategic communication management. You are recognizing the cause-and-effect relationship of communication and the achievement of your organization’s mission. Consider the issues (cause) and what they are making happen (effects), then develop communication activity that will help the organization achieve its goals.
This article is an excerpt from The Communication Plan by Les Potter, ABC, available from the IABC Knowledge Centre.