Whenever someone says, “I want to create [insert name of content here, like a video, a podcast, an article] about [insert topic here, like our work or our program] my first question is always:
The answer is usually along the lines of, “Because I want people to know about it.”
That’s fair. Of course they do. There are a lot of great programs and missions out there, and a lot of people doing the hard work of making the world a better place.
But I always like to ask the question of why because we can make great content all day, but without a plan in place guiding the content creation, as well as the communication of that content, organizations run the risk of making great content that hardly anyone ever sees or hears.
Or, they run the risk of making content that doesn’t make sense for their audience.
They also run the risk of making content that doesn’t do the work they intended, and therefore doesn’t maximize the time or money invested in creating it.
What they really want is for that content to help achieve a specific goal, which is likely something deeper than just knowing about a program. But without clarity around what the content should help achieve, there’s a real risk of not meeting the objective.
This post offers a guide to help small businesses and nonprofits create a strategic communication plan that will help manage content creation and communication and marketing outreach more effectively. I’ll share a three-section framework for you to try that drills down from overall strategy to individual content creation and distribution. I’ll cover what you need to do, why, and how, step-by-step.
You can use this guide as a starting point for creating your strategic communication plan. Once you have these pieces, you can tweak as needed based on your organization’s needs. Regardless of where you end up, the important part is that you get your plans written down and organized so that you can create more effective communications that achieve your goals, and save you time and money along the way.
I am a proponent of as few management documents as possible to keep things simple, organized, and achievable. Especially for smaller teams and organizations, you don’t need a dozen different documents for managing your communication program. This framework consists of one overall planning document and one additional spreadsheet, which should be linked from the main document. A Word or PowerPoint document plus an Excel spreadsheet can be all you need for your strategic communication plan.
The main document has your overall thinking, and the linked spreadsheet becomes your living workbook for creating and managing your communications.
Your Strategic Communication Plan will document what you communicate (and/or market), why, and how you’ll do it. You can break your plan into three sections:
Open up a blank document on the other screen and let’s dive in to each section.
As stated above, strategy is all about what and why. What business result are you looking for? Why are you communicating with your audience? What’s the goal for your communications? Who is it for? What are you trying to achieve and why are you trying to achieve it?
A communication strategy is high-level, usually to support an organization’s business goals. Your communication strategy can have the following elements:
You’ll likely have several audiences (donors, community members, volunteers, etc.), and your goals for each might vary. Here is an excellent guide to planning based on audience personas and how to create them.
Example:
You may decide in your communication strategy that you want to make sure more people in your community (audience) know about your organization’s events (communication goal), because you want to increase community involvement at your events by 5% (business objective). You know that many parents in your community like family-friendly events, so a key message might be that the event is kid-friendly. You might also include research for how people in your community get their information (audience insight) and new trends within your industry that might influence specific parts of your event (background information), and any budget or staffing considerations. A KPI might be that more people visit your event website.
Your communication plan uses your strategic thinking to lay out how you’ll get from point A to point B. It gets into the tactics of how you’ll achieve your goals. This part should be reviewed on a regular basis.
A communication plan can include the following:
Each of your chosen channels needs a strategy within your communication plan. A table or grid with channels across the top and the following list down the lefthand side should work well. Keep in mind that your website is a channel as well, and you need to manage it. Each channel should have:
Placing each channel and it’s strategy in a grid will help you see how the content you create in one section can be utilized across other channels around the same time. You should start to see how you can maximize one piece of content in different ways to save you time (and therefore money).
Example, continued:
Your communication plan will consider how you’ll reach people in your community. You think about what your audience wants to know from you. Your research led you to believe your audiences like to receive emails and are active on Instagram and Facebook. You decide that you’ll become active on those channels because managing those channels seems achievable for your organization – you think you can actually keep up with regularly engaging on those communication channels (this is just as important as the channels your audience uses).
In the channel grid section, you create a column labeled “Email” and list details how you’ll go about your email program. Each row will includes the information in the list above, laying out your email strategy row by row. You do the same for the “Instagram” column and the “Facebook” column as well. You have a website, so you add that column as well.
You know that you’ll want to create blog articles for your website, and you’ll use the blog content to populate a lot of your content for your emails and social media.
You know in certain months you’ll want to focus on certain topics, and you know the types of content you need to create for your channels from your channel grid work. You think about your big spring event, and note that as your editorial theme around that time. You consider that you do not have much photography of your events and programs, and decide to check into hiring a photographer. You make a note of that under “Constraints.” You set aside time on your calendar to regularly review and note how your channels are performing and how you are doing towards your objectives.
