If your comms strategy is more than 3 pages long, no one will read it
If you want to excel at a career in communications you need to develop strategic skills alongside your tactical skillset. So although your ability to create exceptional materials within tight timeframes will make you shine early on, if you want to continue progressing to more senior roles, you will need to be able to create overarching strategies that guide what you and your team do and when it’s done.
One of the biggest challenges around creating communications strategies is capturing everything that’s needed in a single document. I sat in a briefing meeting last week and came out with close to five pages of initial notes. Translating this into a concise and meaningful strategy is definitely hard. Here are my tips on how you can streamline information
Remember the purpose + make it clear
Getting clear on the purpose of a communications strategy is important if you want to create a good one. This is not just to guide your work, but also to capture the attention of your stakeholders and show them where you’re going. A communications strategy is not a document that captures every single key message and activity you will undertake. It is something that highlights the most important information that you need to convey (ie high level key messages) and the overarching approach to your work. Remind yourself of this when you are developing your strategy and also make it clear to stakeholders inside and outside your team. Let them know that appendixes and materials will be developed with further information, but the strategy is much more high level.
What is interesting
Figuring out which messages are most important and should be included in a strategy can be tricky. A good strategy for weeding out what’s most important is to think about what stands out as the most interesting. If you were to describe this piece of work to someone who knew nothing about the project, what would you want them to know? What would come after this? These pieces of information are probably your key messages to include. Anything that you would leave until much later in the conversation can be captured in an appendix of key messages.
To ensure you’re on the right track, also consider which messages would resonate well with the media outlets you want to reach as well as key audiences that are important.
Create buckets
Creating stages or themes within your strategy can also help you organise information and communicate it more clearly. For example, rather than creating a huge timeline of activities break them down into stages such as:
Launch stage
Reinforcing key messages
Campaign wrap up
This will make information easier to digest and stay with those who read it. You can also create themes amongst the type of content you’d like to share. Some examples to consider include:
Explainer content
Time bound content
User generated content
I hope this has helped you think about how you can make your communications strategies more streamlined and easier to digest. What have I missed?