Communications Planning

HOW EFFECTIVE IS YOUR COMMUNICATIONS PLANNING?

Effective communication planning ensures your communication efforts are aligned with your organisation’s mission and vision. A written plan assists you in assessing what time and resources you will need to carry out your proposed communication efforts. Effective communication planning enables you to articulate long-term communication efforts—activities that may take longer than a year to implement or execute—as well as shorter-term plans. Regular monitoring of your communications plan allows you to gauge whether you are reaching your goals and whether you need to adjust your activities in response to changing circumstances. Evaluation allows you to assess how well you did and to analyse why you were successful, or not.

• Discuss the results of this organisational strength map with IFEX. We may be able to connect you with relevant reference materials, external consultants, training opportunities or a skills exchange with another IFEX member.
• Discuss the results with some of your most committed funders who may be able to support some areas of your organisational development.

HOW EFFECTIVE IS YOUR COMMUNICATIONS PLANNING?

1. We plan our communications work in detail at least once a year, and create a written document to capture our plans.

Yes
Somewhat
No

2. When we plan our communications work, we always refer to our strategic plan, and ensure that our communications work is aligned with our mission and vision.

Yes
Somewhat
No

3. When we create our communications plan, we ensure that we are taking steps to support the organisation’s key activities with effective communication strategies.

Yes
Somewhat
No

4. We have staff responsible for communications who have sufficient skills in this area. We have designated staff to speak on the organisation’s behalf.

Yes
Somewhat
No

5. We have clear approval processes in place for authorizing written communications, such as website posts, press releases and public letters.

Yes
Somewhat
No

6. We have a clear understanding of who the audiences are for our communications efforts and target our approaches and channels based on which audience(s) we want to reach.

Yes
Somewhat
No

7. We have established goals and timetables around specific communications efforts.

Yes
Somewhat
No

8. We have identified key messages for each of our communications efforts.

Yes
Somewhat
No

9. We regularly use monitoring tools to gather information that helps us assess whether our communication efforts are achieving what we set out to achieve, and we evaluate our communications efforts against our plan at the end of each planning period, taking these results into account in planning for the future.

Yes
Somewhat
No

10. We have a crisis communications plan in place that sets out how to respond and communicate on emergency or unforeseen issues. This includes a social media crisis plan for responding to issues that arise in social media.

Yes
Somewhat
No