5 questions to ask for communications success

The educational nonprofit must have been doing something fine for humankind.

After all, Connie Mayse, human resources communications manager at Aon, was working for the group pro bono, helping it improve its confused messaging.

The nonprofit’s volume of emails was a bit—how shall we put it?—overenthusiastic, and its recipients were squawking.

“I had one person actually count 600 emails—now that included replies and such—but 600 emails in a six-month period from this organization,” Mayse says,“and he actually printed off about a third of these just to prove his point.”

Er, thanks for the dead trees! Now the worthy nonprofit just had to figure out who its audience was.

In a Ragan Training video, “Seven Steps to a Strategic Communication Plan,” Mayse lays out questions to ask and actions to take that could benefit both internal and external communicators.

She offers five key questions that communicators should guide executives to ask themselves:

1. Where are we, and how did we get here?

This is the situational analysis. What have you communicated in the past, and have those communications been effective? What is the audience’s perception?

You also must figure out what is changing, and where you might encounter areas of resistance.

Mayse asks whether your audiences “are aware of what’s going on? Have they had other communications that have left them, for instance, wary or mistrustful? Really spend the time on setting the stage before anything else.”

2. What do you want to accomplish?

List your objectives. That might sound simplistic, but you would be amazed to hear how many communicators chirp, “People will be aware of what’s going on!”

Not good enough, Mayse says. You must set measureable outcomes that are linked to the project. “What do you want your audience to feel, to know, to do?” she says.

Your objectives should be specific, measureable, realistic and time-bound. In other words, set a deadline.

Here’s a helpful place to begin: Finish this sentence: After our communication plan is implemented…

Your answer could be along the following lines:

• …employees will be aware of the changes to their benefits and will enroll by the deadline.
• …investors will understand the proposed changes and vote in support of the board.
• …leaders will champion the new process and require its implementation among their direct reports.

3. What should people hear?

“What do you want them to do?” Mayse says. “This is the call to action, so it can be an alert that something is going to happen—what to look for. It can be that a specific action you want them to take, and the step-by-step instructions to take that.”

This means offering compelling messages and supporting objectives linked to your overall strategy, business needs and values.

4. Who should hear the message?

In other words, who is your audience?

That educational nonprofit? When Mayse asked who its audience was, she was told, “Our alumni, and then it’s our current and prospective students.”

The officials there, however, hadn’t considered subsets of that audience—or others who were targeted. They hadn’t considered whether donors are a distinct audience, or whether to break alumni into other categories. What about business partners, community leaders, friends and family of alumni?

Nor was it weighing audience characteristics such as culture, language, location and access to technology.

It’s not just the do-gooders of the word. For-profits can be just as prone to poorly defined or segmented audiences. A telecom that had just gone through a merger wanted to communicate with leaders and employees, but officials hadn’t thought through differences in values and corporate culture among the four merged units, Mayse says.

It didn’t occur to anyone to ask whether communications should be segmented among the 44 locations in two states-or that there was a rural and urban divide in the company.

Says Mayse: “There were a lot of nuances that we had been missing previously.”

5. What’s the plan?

The telecom had previously set up an employee communications TV channel—but there was nothing on it, Mayse says. Communicators decided to use it as the primary source. Employees could view it at home; their spouses could view it. What a great place to put general benefit information for annual enrollment, for instance.

In the webinar, Mayse goes on to discuss matters such as budgeting, tools, metrics, evaluation, tactics and timing.

“Set a guiding principle,” Mayse says. “Communicate changes first to the group directly impacted.”

Editor’s note: This story is taken from Ragan Communications’ distance-learning portal Ragan Training. The site contains hundreds of hours of case studies, video presentations and interactive courses.

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