When defining a communication strategy you need to establish your planning approach your template structure and then how you’re going to track the work. In this post I’ll show you how to go through each of these three steps to make sure your strategy as effective.
Begin with looking at what stakeholders you need to identify. Creative management needs to identify the messages that each stakeholder will be interested in. Internal stakeholders can communicate this to you directly. Formulating messages for external stakeholders should be done in collaboration with other members of your management team.
This planning phase also needs to decide what type of methods you’re going to use for communicating reports as well as the frequency. Too often and it becomes a burden to produce your communications so you need to track this carefully.
It is always worth starting your communication strategy template with a basic structure. This should include details of your business objectives, progress updates, budgetary details, and if the milestones you’ve hit, issues identified, risks and opportunities. This can then include the various messages that the stakeholders have requested. If the sections do not fit in neatly with their messages they you should always consider adding appendices for backup data or extra charts.
All you have left to do now is to start sending out your reports and track which people receive these reports and when. You can use this at a later stage to alter the frequency or communication methods. It also means you have a record of non-repudiation in case individuals state they did not receive reports.
Log file shows be kept of any changes to the content or template structure that have been requested. Over time the communication strategy template will have to alter to accommodate new messages and your list of stakeholders will also alter as changes in your company occur.