Create a comms strategy the easy way - Your questions answered.
On Monday 20th July, I was thrilled to present a workshop at the brilliant Comms by the Coast, set up by the equally brilliant Jo Walters of 25 Dots.
The session was all about creating a comms strategy in a way that is easy.
I thought long and hard about the title of the session, and after much creative refinement and iteration, I came up with “Create a comms strategy the easy way.”
I was blown away by the reaction. Over 95 brilliant comms professionals from Students’ Unions right across the UK took part and engaged with the workshop.
You can watch the entire thing below (it’s about an hour):
I did manage to answer a couple of questions at the end of the session, but as there were so many participants, unfortunately there were a lot that went unanswered.
Thanks to the technical expertise of Andrew Keenan, we were able to capture all your questions. And here are my answers…
Any thoughts on how to get the whole team on board with following a strategy?
How do you prevent other teams going off track and not adhering to the Comms Strategy?
Getting buy-in from your colleagues is pretty much essential to it being successful. There’s never any absolute guarantee of buy-in of course, because humans are complex, strange things.
However, for me there are a few things I would always suggest doing:
Firstly, involve as many of your colleagues as you can in the process. Creating your comms strategy is a great way (excuse) to get your whole team together to work on something fun. I tend to do this using sharpie pens, post-it notes and flip chart paper (when safety allows). I would tend to run a session that, depending on what time you have available could last an hour to two – or could easily last an entire day.
Once you’ve done your workshop, take some time to analyse what you’ve come up with,and present it back to the group and ask for any initial feedback.
That way, all your colleagues enjoy the process, have the assumptions challenged in a safe, friendly environment, and actually have some ownership over the results of it.
Their thoughts, experiences and insight will have been captured, which, not only should make them feel more involved, but will actually help you create a better strategy.
If your colleagues can see that involvement and “find their place” within the resulting strategy, you have a much better chance of it being adhered to and embraced.
Secondly. Make the resulting strategy easy to access, understand and use. For me, I always think it’s about having a version that’ll fit on one side of paper and be stuck to the way for people to refer to.
Thirdly. Be a good comms colleague! Make yourselves as visible as possible. Get people to know, respect and like you and what you do. If you get to that point, they’re more likely to seek and respect your opinion – and accept your guidance.
Fourthly – get as much insight as possible. Comms is a very subjective world. Everyone has an opinion. Our job is to take as much subjectivity out of this process as possible. You can do that by looking at data. You can do it by speaking directly to students. The more you do this the better. But if time and practicality doesn’t allow this – getting the insight from your colleagues’ experiences will help do get a lot of insight. Comms strategy utopia is about getting to a point where what you’re suggesting is almost inarguable because it is so evidence-based and obvious to everyone. That’s not always where you’ll end up (it’s rarely where I end up) but aiming for that as the ultimate goal, is a good rule of thumb.
Lastly. Ultimately, sometimes this does come down to strong leadership. Make sure your leaders are involved, bought-in, and if necessary, have all they need to enforce the new way of doing things.
Any or all of these things will help.
What is the one thing that you wish “non-comms” staff knew?
There are so many!
But probably the main one is: remember that every interaction you have with a student or any other stakeholder reflects on the whole organisation, whether we like it or not.
That’s why having an agreed, and coherent way of communicating and engaging with your audiences is so important.
To put it bluntly, let’s just say one of your teams goes rogue. does a crap poster and pins it everywhere. Your students won’t think “wow that poster by that particular team in the SU is a bit rubbish.” They’ll think “that poster by the SU is rubbish”. Which, then becomes perilously close to “the SU is a bit rubbish”.
So, as much as it might not feel like it sometimes to everyone, these are the details that do ultimately matter.
SUs can have a variety of different services that they offer (e.g. societies, advice centre, commercial venues etc)... would you recommend having a Comms strategy for the entire organisation? Per department/service? Or by campaign/project?
I work in a union with a very small team covering 4 campuses, all different (type of audience, funding, engagement etc) Would you create separate strategies for each campus?
I just wanted to ask how he would see this would work at a strategic all-union level. Like, are they individual plans we're looking at for each project or discrete area, or are we looking to marry this all together in one strategic doc?
I’d always recommend having one for the whole organisation – so everyone is aligned. See the previous point, and it builds coherence and trust across the whole student population.
However you could (and in many cases should) have delivery plans in place for each service or location. But they should all follow the principles and objectives of your main strategy.
You could of course use the 7 questions to formulate those plans and go through a similar process to get to those plans
Just make sure that they add to the bigger picture of the organisation whether that’s with branding or the tone of voice in the language you use for the outputs.
Remember that every interaction with any students that any service has builds a picture in that student’s head about what you’re like as an organisation, so while absolutely you should have plans in place for each service or location(and that might include campaigns to promote them), they need to be helping to build that positive image of the whole SU, service by service.
How do you pick the channel as you said the channel will become obvious?
Get to know them! Understand channels and be excited about them. But also understand your audience and how to reach them. Your strategy process will help you do to this.
Once you know the channels that will best reach your audiences, then you’ll need to consider your budget, technical capability and capacity then almost by a process of elimination, the right channels for you will emerge.
How should you embed a comms strategy into the overall Union strategy so that it isn't separate thing but embedded in what we do?
Ideally, develop them at the same time.
The process I go through (asking the 7 questions) can also be used to form the basis to develop a full strategy as well. You can then use the insight from this process to also create your strategy.
But if you can’t do this, the you could use the objectives and priorities of your strategy to form the What, How and Why of your comms strategy. You could then just focus on the “Think” “Feel” “Do” part to create your priorities and messages – and ultimately your channels.
Can you share an example strategy on a page please?
Yes I can. But as they all relate to particular clients, I’d rather not post these publicly. So please email me via ben@greyfoxcomms.co.uk and I’ll pick out a good example for you.
What do you do if your content is good but you can’t reach your audience on social media?
Very interesting question. It depends what you mean by “good”.
For me, content is only “good” if it’s meeting an objective – so before developing content you need to understand your audience and how to reach them – and your message.
It might be a bit before your time, but there’s a line in a film I always refer to when tackling this or similar questions.
There’s a scene in 24 Hour Party People where Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) has recently opened the legendary Hacienda nightclub in Manchester and the artist Peter Saville (responsible for among others Joy Division’s album artwork) shows him a beautifully designed poster for a gig that happened a week previously.
Wilson looks at the poster and compliments it. “It’s beautiful. Genius actually.” (I’m paraphrasing to avoid swear words).
But as he remembers that the gig happened over a week ago, he goes on:
“But it’s useless. And as William Morris once said; ‘Nothing useless can truly be beautiful’”.
I think this is a good rule of thumb for all comms content.
Your content is only really “good” if it can affect a particular outcome. That could be getting people to attend a gig, it could be to sign them up to a particular important cause or connecting them with a particular important support service you offer.
If you can’t reach people by a particular method, find one you can reach them by, and make sure that whatever you do in that channel is something you’re proud of, and makes a difference.
In other words, if your gig is tomorrow, the most beautifully designed poster in the world is pointless if it only gets put up next week…
Could we have a template for this?i
Thanks everyone for taking part in the workshop – and an especially massive thanks to Jo for inviting me and for Andrew for managing the session so brilliant.y.
Good luck everyone with your new academic years. And don’t hesitate to drop me a line if I can ever help with anything else.
