Strategic communications
Your success – even survival – will depend upon the outside support you garner through strategic communications about your work. Your communications program must gain and retain the attention of the people you need, and establish trust in your leadership and your product. You must know your audiences, and develop clear, on-mission messages with consistent looks, tone, delivery, and excellence in writing and graphics.
Great stories and powerful pictures are vital in your communications efforts. Too often, we lose audiences -- or never get them in the first place -- because we fail to tell the right story well, or to use the telling picture. If your communications are clogged with charts and graphs or jargon and verbal clutter, we can help you cut through to the story at the heart of your mission -- the possibility that drives you, and can drive others to support you.
But your staying power will require more than stirring stories and engaging images. Support will last and grow based on credible data about your impact. What are you accomplishing? How do you know? You convey seriousness of purpose and respect for your audience by providing real information about results. Part of your strategic and program planning must address how you will secure the data you need to demonstrate your effectiveness: how to collect and store it; how to get permission to use anecdotal data such as stories, testimonials, and photos; and how to recognize, collect, and analyze useful quantitative data.
If you need help with strategic communications, we will begin with a communications audit, examining your entire communications program – audiences, messages, intent, design, delivery systems, and impact. Then we will rethink all of these categories strategically.
We will ask questions like these: Who needs to know what you’re doing? What do you want them to do? What do they need to know? What will move them? What is the best way to get their attention? How do you know? How will you select, craft, frame, and deliver the messages critical to your success? Who will be responsible for undertaking this work? What will it cost, and where will the funds for it originate?
You know from your own experience how easy it is to filter out most of the messages streaming at us today. This experience, too, is expertise, which we can apply to your strategic communications decisions to get attention, establish trust, and tell your story with data, consistency, and style.
Great stories and powerful pictures are vital in your communications efforts. Too often, we lose audiences -- or never get them in the first place -- because we fail to tell the right story well, or to use the telling picture. If your communications are clogged with charts and graphs or jargon and verbal clutter, we can help you cut through to the story at the heart of your mission -- the possibility that drives you, and can drive others to support you.
But your staying power will require more than stirring stories and engaging images. Support will last and grow based on credible data about your impact. What are you accomplishing? How do you know? You convey seriousness of purpose and respect for your audience by providing real information about results. Part of your strategic and program planning must address how you will secure the data you need to demonstrate your effectiveness: how to collect and store it; how to get permission to use anecdotal data such as stories, testimonials, and photos; and how to recognize, collect, and analyze useful quantitative data.
If you need help with strategic communications, we will begin with a communications audit, examining your entire communications program – audiences, messages, intent, design, delivery systems, and impact. Then we will rethink all of these categories strategically.
We will ask questions like these: Who needs to know what you’re doing? What do you want them to do? What do they need to know? What will move them? What is the best way to get their attention? How do you know? How will you select, craft, frame, and deliver the messages critical to your success? Who will be responsible for undertaking this work? What will it cost, and where will the funds for it originate?
You know from your own experience how easy it is to filter out most of the messages streaming at us today. This experience, too, is expertise, which we can apply to your strategic communications decisions to get attention, establish trust, and tell your story with data, consistency, and style.