[00:01:00]

Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Of course, if you're just tuning in for the first time, a massive welcome to you as well. As always, I've been loving getting your feedback and questions from those of you who are regular listeners. So please keep sending that through. I love it. And it absolutely does contribute to the content that I'm delivering through this podcast. And you should see my list at the moment I started off one day, just like writing out, okay, let's just list all the things I could talk about on this podcast. And I got to about 70 topics it's now at about 80. So that's thanks to you. And thanks to some, you know, experiences that I have as I work with my clients as well. So look out for even more [00:02:00] content in the future.

Assuming of course, that y'all finding this useful. And it's another beautiful sunny afternoon here in Brisbane, the cicadas are chirping very loudly outside. So if you can hear those in the background, hopefully they're not too distracting. Or maybe for those of you who are in Brisbane or are from Brisbane originally, they'll bring you a bit of a sense of nostalgia.

So today I'm going to give you the 101 on how to write a solid communication plan. It's the number- one thing I've been asked to do or help with in my career. And while the complexity of a plan does change depending on the context, the key elements absolutely stayed the same. So, this is going to be a really good juicy episode for those of you who need to learn the skill or who want a bit of a refresher.

Before we get started, let's have a quick chat about why you even need to write a comms plan in the first place. I mean, can't you just go send an email? Well, in some cases you [00:03:00] can, if it's literally just, you need to let your team know about something, go forth and do it. But if you are involved in a change or a new project or a campaign of some description, then you absolutely should think about writing a comms plan. So why might you need one? Well, firstly, to get clear on who you need to communicate to how and when you'll communicate. So you might remember right back in episode one I shared that the top thing that every piece of communication should come down to is who we start with, who.

And your plan can really help you just nut out who are your key audiences that you need to communicate to. And from there, you can understand the how, and when. The comms plan also helps you understand the why you're communicating in the first place and therefore, what kind of response and what kind of resourcing you need to put into it.

And as I said before, it could be for anything like supporting a campaign like Safety Week [00:04:00] or a customer advertising campaign. Or maybe it's more about a change. So like a digital transformation, a merger and acquisition or restructure, whatever that looks like. It's really important to remember though, that your comms plan is not your project plan. And I don't know how many times I've had to bang on about this in the past, but I'm doing it again.

A good comms plan relies on a good project plan. Project plans tell us when key milestones are dropping, what the project is trying to achieve, your key stakeholders all that sort of stuff. Honestly, I've lost count of the number of times I've been expected to write a comms plan with no project plan or a really poor one.

Or my comms plan has been taken by someone in the business and presented as a project plan elsewhere. So my advice to you is always ask to see the project plan first. And when doing that rather [00:05:00] than taking a negative approach, like "I can't write a comms plan until you write a project plan", which is just going to put people offside, make it a more active approach. Like, "once I've received your project plan, I'll be able to write the comms plan to support the project plan."

Another thing to note, even if you get a project plan, you should still get a really good brief. So the plan will be a very, very useful piece of collateral, of course, but you need to know higher up what are people trying to achieve? Why, who's involved. If there's a sense of urgency, what's driving that where the change impacts the most likely to be felt, all those sorts of things.

So two things to remember, always ask to see the project plan first. Remember that a good comms plan relies on a good project plan. And even if you get a project plan, you should still get a brief.

So let's say you've got the brief, you've got the project plan, then it's time to write the comms plan. The first part of the [00:06:00] plan, I always have a bit of a background. So a very brief synopsis, just a couple of sentences. Maybe with some dot points of what the project is about and what the project is trying to achieve, not what the comms are trying to achieve. So what the project is trying to achieve.

This just means that whoever is reviewing or approving the plan can be reminded of what the project is about. And what the comms plan is supporting. So for example, Uh, you might be writing a comms plan for, to support a safety campaign. The objectives of the safety campaign would be ultimately to keep people safer, reducing number of incidents, or maybe get more people to, uh, do online training, whatever that might be.

So you're going to put that in there. Your comms plan objectives will help to align to those business objectives. So this is then the next part, you've written the background, the next part is, then we talk about your objectives for your comms plan. Remember, we [00:07:00] talked back in episode two about the three key objectives every comms plan should have?

If you haven't listened to that episode yet, do go back and listen to it. Or if you have forgotten about it, those three objectives are know, feel and do. So, what do we want people to know? What do we want people to do? And what do we want people to feel? So again, if we think about a safety campaign as an example, what do you want people to know? Okay, well that it's Safety Week, that safety is everyone's responsibility that we want to reduce the number of incidents we want to keep people safe, et cetera, et cetera.

What do we want people to do? Well, we might want them to complete some online training. We might want them to do a checklist of their own area, something like that. What do you want them to feel as a result of the communication? So this is where the rubber really hits the road in terms of tackling into, or getting into the emotive side of people's behaviors.

People make decisions based on emotion. [00:08:00] And so they're more likely to make a, do the action that you want if there's some emotional element that drives them. But it's backed by logic and fact. So if we think about that from a comms point of view, and let's say again, it's a safety campaign. Maybe we want them to feel a sense of pride in how safe their team is or their business. Maybe we want them to feel a sense of, uh, even a little bit of sense of worry about the safety of their colleagues and the people they care about.

Um, maybe it's a sense of worry about, "Hey, what if I didn't come home from work tomorrow? Or I came to work, or I ended up in hospital and my family had to go on without me?" So those sorts of things, that feel is really going to drive the connection your comms have with your audience. Speaking of who, now we start to step out the who. So who are your key audiences for your communication?

They could be internal, external or both. So maybe they're team members, the board, the exec team, [00:09:00] they could be customers, members. Uh, they could be regulators, media, even. Who are those people? What do you know about them? In a really complex change plan, what I normally do is actually step out the know, feel and do objectives by each audience because they can vary quite a bit, but for the purposes of a general sort of typical comms plan, just keep those know, feel and do quite high level.

By stepping out your who, remember there's no one size fits all. So before you even get to the comms tactics themselves, you need to think about who you're talking to. Your audiences will drive the strategy you choose. They will drive the communication channels you decide to use. Or who's delivering them. So is it the CEO? Is it the team leader? Is it somebody else altogether?

And what those messages actually are. There might be one overarching 'why' for the project, but that why will mean different things to different [00:10:00] people as well. So you have to be really aware of what sort of nuances do you have to apply to your messaging and to your objectives when you're thinking about your audience. So for example, with the safety campaign, we'll look, um, customers might not care all that much about your people absolutely will. So the differences there will be in the messaging and how you approach it.

So absolutely map out your audience. As I said before, internally, that could be senior leaders or team leaders, specific teams. Uh, even the board.

Externally, they might be customers, shareholders, regulators, the general public media. Whoever that might be, that you work with your partners, sponsors, corporate partners. In a complex change, I would map these audiences out by level of impact, but that's a conversation for another podcast.

Now, then we get to the comms strategy itself. So in another episode, I'll talk in more depth about the difference between a strategy and a plan, but for the [00:11:00] purposes of giving you the 101 in this episode, consider the strategy your overall approach to your communication plan. So for example, will it be people led.

We take a predominantly digital approach. Will your comms be timed in a particular way for a particular reason, et cetera, et cetera. So, this is the part of the plan where you can demonstrate your strategic thinking. It elevates you above tactics and it is intrinsically linked to your objectives and your audiences.

So again, let's think about that safety campaign: maybe the comms strategy here would be that you're going to use personal stories of people in the business who have been impacted by a lack of safety or health in some way to demonstrate why it's so important for everybody to be aware of safety. So that's just one strategy.

You might also go, you. We're going to use, um, more in-person events for safety week because it helps to drive better [00:12:00] engagement. And we're going to have multiple touch points for people to be able to easily access the information they need. Just really examples. But as you can see, that's the approach. I'm not even talking about channels, I'm not talking about messaging, any of that sort of stuff I'm talking about. What's our strategy, our approach to this.

Okay. So right now you have written the project background, the communications objectives. You've decided who your audiences are and what your strategy is going to be. It can also be a good idea to list any risks, opportunities, and assumptions. So for example, you might assume there's going to be a budget available to do some of the things you're advising. That's helpful.

Uh, but that's just an assumption, perhaps. So you've got to write that down. You might identify a risk. Like there's a lot of other announcements going out at the same time in the business. Or there's currently a media environment that's not favorable to your industry. Or there's a [00:13:00] change in leadership happening, whatever that might be.

This is your opportunity to show your sense of business acumen. But it's also really important to list these things because the person who is ultimately responsible for approving the plan. Needs to be well-informed and you might raise some very valid reasons. As to why they should switch tactics or even delay what they're doing.

I've certainly been in that position before. And it is a benefit of a centralised corporate affairs team that you have this helicopter view of everything that's going on in the business. And so you have this really good opportunity to be able to provide some great advice on what's happening and what some risks are. If you see a clash between certain things, or I've even found before that, you know, one area of the business, one of their teams was doing something. And I knew another team is doing something. It was pretty much the same something. So I hooked them up and said, maybe you guys want to sort this out and then come back to me. [00:14:00] So, again, this is your opportunity to showcase your sense of business acumen. And when you do that, you show the business what value you can add. And that you're more than just the copywriting monkey or the person who pretties up the PowerPoints.

You actually have a really good head about you and your sense of the business itself. Now moving on in some comms plans, you might include key messages. I personally like to keep them in a separate document. For a couple of reasons. The number one reason is people get distracted by them. So they get caught up in semantics, when really what you want them to focus on is the plan itself. So if you've got them in your comms plan, honestly that people really get caught up on this stuff and just distracts them from what you really need them to do. Also, unlike the comms plan or at least in my experience, there's usually so much back and forth on key messages that having them in the same document as the comms plan would [00:15:00] actually delay the approval of the plan. At least, if you can get the plan approved, you can keep pushing ahead with things, um, and the key messages can kind of float around in the background, going back and forth between people. Another reason, key messages should be based on your audience analysis or your understanding of the project objectives and your comms objectives.

If you get any feedback on your plan that alters either the audience, the project objectives or the comms objectives, that's going to alter your key messages. So I get the plan right first. Again, though, that is up to you. If you decide to have it all in one pack or keep those key messages separate, that's just my advice from my own experience.

Okay, so let's do a quick recap. We've covered off project background, comms objectives, audiences, strategy, any risks, opportunities, or assumptions. The other piece I would put in here is measurement. So how are you going to measure your [00:16:00] communications? And I would go back to episode four. So last week's episode for some tips on measurement to go into that.

Really, again, putting them into the plan, shows that you're I guess serious about making this work. And it does show again, that sense of business acumen. So absolutely get some measures in your plan.

Okay. So now we get to the plan itself or what I call the communication sequence, because otherwise it's a little bit confusing. So, this is where you will spell out exactly what is being communicated to who, when, by what channel, using whose voice and what the content will be. I use a table for this. And sometimes I include another column for responsibility. So who is actually responsible for developing or delivering a particular piece of comms?

And sometimes, or instead of, I will include a column for status just to give people an idea of where that piece of comms is at. Has it been drafted? Has it been [00:17:00] approved? Has it been sent or published? It does depend on the context. So if I'm working with a lot of people in a very complex comms plan, I usually have a status column in there just to help us track where we're at.

So one of the line items in that table might be for example, that a you've got a webinar with senior leaders from the CEO at 9:00 AM on the Thursday. The next item in the sequence is a, an email with a video to all staff at 9:30. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It's always good to phase the sequence out. So for example, let's say you're launching a new brand. Phase one might be prior to the launch of the brand. So all the comms activity you'll do before. Then phase two is the launch. And then phase three is the post-launch activities. So it helps you when you're writing it, just to chunk it down and take it phase by phase, like, okay in the lead up to the brand launch, what are we going to do two weeks out, one week out, one day out the brand launch itself? What does that look like on the morning? [00:18:00] And then, you know, in the day that follows. And the post-launch activity. What are we doing to embed? It also helps the reviewer to navigate the sequence and the flow of communication as well. And just to understand how it's all going to come together.

The only other thing you might want to include in your plan, and again, this depends on the context, is a list of the collateral you'll be developing. So for example, it might be screensavers, um, social media, content, posters, whatever. Just gives the approvers an idea of what they'll be seeing and what they might need to approve.

I again though, I would suggest a separate document with a complete design brief for these items. So they're all in one place and there's absolute clarity on what's needed. And that, uh, I found that really useful, particularly for something as complex as a brand launch, where you will have a lot of things that need to be developed.

That's much more useful in a separate document.

So. That's the [00:19:00] 101 on writing your fairly standard, typical communication plan. Let's just go back over those key categories or those key parts of the plan. Number one, the project background. So the objectives of the project, not the comms. Okay. Number two is the comms objectives themselves. What do we want people to know, feel and do.

Number three, the audience: who are your key audiences internally, externally, or both? After we've done that we're going to get into the comms strategy. So detailing your overall approach to communication, to support the project.

You're then going to list any risks, opportunities and assumptions. You'll include some measures and then you'll get into the comms sequence itself. You may want to include key messages, but again, I've found through trial and error, a lot of trial, uh, that keeping those separate is actually much more useful.

. [00:20:00] Now, if you do need a bit more support with this, I do offer masterclasses on this topic, which we facilitate via zoom with your team. So hit me up if you think that might be useful. And as part of those masterclasses, I'll give you templates that you can use. We'll go through them together and I can answer any questions you have, and we can even do a live example.

People do find that much more useful, I think, than just being handed a template. So if that is something you're interested in, please get in touch. At the end of the day, look, I've been honing and tweaking my comms plans templates for 20 years and I will probably continue to do so. In fact, I still do so.

But this format in particular is one I found works really well for most projects or for most pieces of work.

But if you've got any questions or comments or you found things that work for you, I'd love to hear it. So please get in touch and as always. I welcome your feedback and your questions. Thank you for tuning in. It's a pleasure to talk all things [00:21:00] comms and help everyone develop less chatter and more matter.

Tune in next week for a fresh episode until then keep doing amazing things.