Getting Strategic About Communications: How to Conduct a Communications Audit
The better you are able to communicate with your stakeholders—including program participants, partners, and what we term “social impact investors”—the greater success you will have in getting them excited about your work and ultimately achieving your desired social impact. Most organizations produce an array of materials that they distribute externally. Stepping back to consider the various audiences you are targeting with those materials, and to identify the best ways to reach them, will ensure that you are communicating the importance of your work effectively.
To begin getting more strategic about your communications, we recommend conducting a communications audit, by following these steps:
- Identify your target audiences. Most organizations have multiple target audiences, including the primary beneficiaries of their programs, partner organizations that may help to expand the reach of their work, and current and potential social impact investors. (We define social impact investor as anyone whose primary expectation in providing funding to an organization is measurable social impact. Social impact investors may be foundations, corporations, government, or individuals.) If you are seeking to raise awareness about your target social problem, or promote a new approach to addressing it, you may also be targeting the general public on a local or national level. Make a list of the audiences that are most important to achieving your desired social impact.
- Compile your existing communications materials. These may include a Web site, brochures, e-newsletters, PowerPoint presentations and other materials used for fundraising, press releases, information packets, and past media coverage. As you gather your communications materials, organize them according to your target audiences. Do you have communications materials to address each of these audiences? Are there communications materials, such as a Web site, that need to appeal to multiple audiences?
- Review your messaging. Keeping your target audiences in mind, consider the messaging in your existing communications materials. It is often helpful at this stage to seek feedback from your staff, board, past participants in your programs, peer organizations, and other stakeholders. Are you consistent in the language you use to describe your organization and its work? Are you providing your audiences with a clear sense of what you do, in terms that will appeal to them? Does your messaging communicate the social impact that your organization has had and will have in the future?
Choose the best examples of your messaging to compile a standard messaging document. Future written communications can draw from these samples for clear, consistent, and appealing language.
- Consider how you represent your brand. Look at the way in which you represent your brand in all of your communications materials. Is there a consistent look and feel throughout? Do you have guidelines for using logos and colors associated with your brand that can guide the development of future documents? If so, do you have templates for memos, slide presentations, job descriptions, and other materials that will ensure consistent branding and messaging — in addition to helping to make the process of creating new materials more efficient?
- Put your audit in action. Using your answers to the questions outlined in steps one through four above, create a list of your communications needs, along with a timeline for addressing them. For example, you may need to add new communications materials, or revise existing ones, to reach your target audiences. As you develop a clear sense of how you want to present your brand, you may consider working with a design firm to develop or refine your logo and color scheme. Finally, you will also want to ensure that you carry your branding decisions on language and presentation throughout all of your public messaging, to present a polished and memorable image of your organization.
With this list and timeline in hand, you are now ready to tackle your communications more strategically.
Ask a Root Cause Consultant: How much should my organization’s communications efforts focus on media coverage?
Our answer to a question from the field.
To submit a question, write to: Ask@rootcause.org.
Whether or not you prioritize media coverage will depend on your target audiences. In general, we believe that sending out an occasional press release is not a good use of organizational resources. You should seek media coverage when you have determined that it will help you to reach one or more of your target audiences with a predetermined set of messages—which could be focused, for example, on an advocacy campaign, offering a new point of view on your target social problem, or raising awareness about your target social problem in general. Many organizations will wait until they have been operating for several years and begun seeing an initial level of success before developing a media strategy. Up to that point, they focus their communications efforts on establishing messaging and branding guidelines, and developing materials that communicate more directly with their target audiences.
Tools for Practitioners
Our favorite tools on the web.
News Releases
SPIN Project
If you decide to prioritize building a media presence as part of your communications strategy, this is an essential primer on when to write a news release, the difference between a press release and a media advisory, and how to pitch your story in following up with reporters. It also includes samples of a press release and a media advisory.
Ten Steps to Stronger Nonprofit Communications
Social Edge
This online discussion starts with a concise list of ten steps that nonprofits can take to tighten their existing communications efforts. The conversation that follows includes helpful commentary from a variety of nonprofits describing their own experiences.
Op-Eds: Framing the Debate
Communications Consortium Media Center
If you have ever considered engaging in public debate on an issue relating to your work through an op-ed, but have been unsure how to do it, this is the place to start. This brief guide explains how to find a paper’s op-ed submission guidelines and provides tips on communicating your messages clearly.
Solutions is the bi-monthly e-newsletter of Root Cause, covering key issues and topics facing leaders in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors working to solve social problems. Root Cause develops and supports enduring solutions to social problems, through strategy consulting, knowledge sharing, and the building of sustainable social enterprises. We envision a world in which the public, private, and nonprofit sectors work together to invest and re-invest in the most efficient, effective, and sustainable solutions to social problems.