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than communications driven. Your communications activity is not an end in itself but should serve and hence be aligned with you organizational objectives. Ask yourself what you can do within communications to help your organization achieve its core objectives. Aligning your communication and organizational objectives will also help to reinforce the importance and relevance of communications and thereby make a convincing case for the proper resourcing of communications activity within your organizations.

- Audience:
You should identify those audiences with whom you need to communicate to achieve your organizational objectives. The best audience to target in order to achieve an object may not always be the most obvious ones, and targeting audiences such as the media may not always help achieve your objectives. Everyone would like a higher media and political profile, yet activities aiming towards this that would otherwise be put towards communicating with key stakeholders.

- Messages:
Strategic targeting and consistency are key to your organization's messages. Create a comprehensive case covering all the key messages, and emphasize the different elements of the case of different audiences.

To maximize impact you should summarize the case in three key points which can be constantly repeated. Remember that communications is all about storytelling: use interesting narrative, human interest stories and arresting imagery.

- Tools and activities:
Identify the tools and activities that are most appropriate to communicating the key messages to the audiences. These will be suggested by your audiences, messages, or a combination of the two. For example, an annual report is a useful tool in corporate communications whereas an e-mail newsletter lends itself well to internal communications. Ensure that you tailor your tools and activities to the level of time and human and financial resources available.

- Resources and timescales:
The key rules to observe are always to deliver what you promise and never over promise. Use your resources and timescales to set legitimate levels of expectations and outline the case for more dedicated resources.

- Evaluation and amendment:
Consider performing a communications audit to assess the effectiveness of your strategy with both your internal and external audiences. You should use open questions with appropriate prompts and benchmarks and if possible, get someone independent to do the work. Consider and discuss the results carefully and use them to amend your strategy.

While drawing up your strategy, you should involve your team, and on a smaller scale, the entire organization. You should also seek approval from both your team and organization. Feed the communications strategy into the organizational strategy to ensure maximum alignment and efficiency. Derive a detailed mouth-by-mouth communications plan from a strategy and monitor and report your activity against the original objectives contained within the strategy.

Learn more about this author, Shamma B S.
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