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Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop

#CommsStrategy

30 May 2012

Assessing your environment

Michele Madden May 2012

Journalists

• Charity Media Monitor

Peers and MPs

• Charity Parliamentary Monitor, Celtic CPM, AAPM (public bodies)

GPs and primary healthcare professionals

• Healthcare Professionals Monitor

Tracking your key audiences

Public

British public

• Charity Awareness Monitor, Brand Attributes Monitor

Young people aged 7-25

• Youth Engagement Monitor

Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland

• Celtic CAM

Professionals

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Creative development, testing, ad tracking

Strategy, brand, fundraising development

Supporter satisfaction

Stakeholder audits and consultation

Evaluation and impact programmes

Research audits

Focus groups

Desk research

Depth interviews

Workshops

Surveys

Consultancy and tailored research

We can help you with... We’re experts in...

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Over 50 CAM syndicate members

Session purpose

Breakout E: Assessing your environment

Before you start your communications strategy it’s essential to consider your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses plus any opportunities and threats your position and environment present.

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Discussion

• Thinking about when you have done exercises like this in the past

o What worked?

o What didn’t work?

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Exercise

• What can we do to mitigate these issues?

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What to investigate?

• External environment

o Direct competitors

o Trends

o Audiences

• Internal environment

o Evaluate past and present campaigns

o Objectives, resources

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The process

• Be clear about your objectives

o organisational

o the process of writing the comms strategy

• Involve people from different teams/departments, as appropriate

o Ensures you bring knowledge from different parts of the organisation

o Good practice for internal comms

• Be realistic – timescales, outputs, budgets

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Tools

• SWOT, PESTLE

• Competitor mapping (audience, theme and reach) o Ad hoc and on-going

• Critical friends

• Existing research, o trends, stats and generic

• Your own knowledge o who impressed/disappointed you

• Assessment of previous performance

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How to use this in your strategy

• Depends on what you have to produce o Setting the context for the decisions you make

• Detail is often the death of these types of processes and

documents o Focus on key areas/issues – there may only be a few key facts

• Only use data that you are confident about o Source any data that you’re using

• Think about data that might be replicable for next year

• Consider what you could use to measure progress towards your goals

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