Okay, the title is not strictly true. But it helps to explain what I learned yesterday.
After a bit of skeptical internal moaning and a train journey to Edinburgh, I went on a one day course to learn about communications strategy.
These courses always seem like a good idea until the day before, then you think about all the work time you are missing and the to do list which is ever growing, but I made sure I went.
When I arrived and sat down I was pleased to see how engaged and enthusiastic the guy was that was taking the workshop. The subject ‘communications strategy’ is particularly relevant to myself in my role so I also made the effort to get excited about learning something new to enhance what I was already doing.
However it wasn’t long before my enthusiasm began to falter. As he went through his introduction he started to talk about SMART objectives, the audience, the budget; everything I had already been thinking about. Maybe I wasn’t going to learn something new.
How wrong was I.
Despite the fact I didn’t learn any new part of creating a strategy, I learned how to organise what I know. Which isn’t something I had ever thought about.
Turns out there is an order to knowing what you know; or more practically, doing what you know.
Once you think about all of the individual parts in a particular order; strategy gets a whole lot more simpler. And then so does your delivery plan; which impacts your motivation, your workload, general happiness…and so on.
So what is the order:
- Be SMART (with your objectives.)
- Think about WHO your stakeholders, influencers and general audience are.
- What CHANNELS will you use (more importantly what channels do your audience use!)
- What is your BUDGET (this is your get out clause!)
- What MESSAGE do you want to your audience to know (How often can you ask, “so what?”)
- Think about your DELIVERY (less strategy more action.)
- How are you measuring your SUCCESS?
- REVIEW. What would you repeat? What would you change?
I came back buzzing and I am now looking forward to putting this into practice!
Until next time,
Gillian