How to develop a communications strategy

An effective communications strategy is important. It can help you engage local people, encourage them to use your service and bring to the attention of health and care services the improvements that people want.

This guide aims to help you consider the key ingredients for developing an effective communications strategy for your organisation. We have also developed a strategy template you can use locally. 

1. What do you want your communications to achieve?

It is vital to start by being clear about what you want your communications to achieve. So start by writing a purpose statement that explains how your communications will help deliver the objectives of your service.

Express your statement in plain English and try to answer the questions:

• What would success look like?
• How will our communications make sure we successfully achieve our objectives?
• What are we hoping to achieve with communications (change in attitude, greater awareness, behaviour change)?

2. Understand where you are now

Before you get into the detail, it is essential to recognise the context within which you communicate.

Be clear:

• How does your strategy links to your strategic priorities?
• What do you know about your audience?
• What have you learnt from your previous communications, and
• other factors like the external environment?

One tool for helping you assess the context is a SWOT analysis. A SWOT enables you to think about your strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats when it comes to questions like:

• The communication skills you have in-house or can purchase;
• The capacity you have available to communicate;
• The access you have to the right channels to reach your audience;
• The insight you have on what your audience thinks and feels and how they act;
• The customer experience you provide and the levels of trust people have in your service; and
• Your ability to creatively engage your audiences with your communications.

3. Identify your audiences and set your objectives

At this point, it is essential to think about who you want to engage with your communications. The more you define your audience, the better the outcomes will be, but it’s necessary also to ask:

• Why? Or in other words what’s the purpose?
• How will you do it?
• What will be the outcome?

Answering these questions can help you ensure that your objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound).

These are just example objectives, and you might have different outcomes you want to achieve, such as:

• Increasing the loyalty or frequency of people who use your service;
• New professionals seeking your advice and insight;
• Reducing the churn of volunteers; or
• More partners who advocate on your behalf.

4. Harness your insight & develop a clear proposition and message

Your detailed, audience-specific messaging will change with each campaign. Yet, at a strategic level, you need to understand your proposition for each audience and the consistent points you want to get across every-time you communicate.

Your proposition should tell your audience the value of the service you are offering or how it meets their needs.

To develop a compelling proposition (and the messages that support it), you need to understand your audience needs and interests, why they engage with Healthwatch and the barriers that might prevent them.

5. Decide how you will reach people and encourage them to act

Insight also plays a big role in deciding which channels or approaches you will invest in to deliver your strategy. Questions to consider include:

• How do people find you?
  • Using search
  • Using social media
  • Via PR in the local media
  • Via on-line and off-line partnerships with services or community groups
  • Via email or events
• Once they find you, do they have a good experience and act?
• Once they act, do they come back to you? Do they tell others about you?

It’s unlikely that you will only invest in one channel. Still, you need to understand which channels deliver you the greatest return, which channels you need to improve and the journey you want your audience to take.

6. Describing your approach

The crux of your strategy is to choose what tactics you will focus on to achieve your objectives. The tactics you choose should link back to the context and be based on audience insight. The final tactics can focus on a range of things, including:

• The channels you choose to focus on improving;
• The processes you decide to adopt; and
• The audiences, issues and content types you think you should prioritise.

The vital step is to refine them down to those that you believe will help you best achieve your objectives.

7. Develop your plan and approach

With a rapidly changing environment, we would suggest taking an agile approach to planning how you will deliver your strategy.

First, size work that is not time-sensitive but needs to happen to achieve your objectives and put this into a pipeline that follows a logical order. Taking this approach means that you can adapt to external pressures while still making progress with high priority improvements.

Secondly, plan out the number of time-sensitive communications projects you need to run.   

An agile approach is essential when it comes to delivering communications because the process helps you continually learning from each activity to help maximise the impact of the next.

One model is known as OASIS, where you follow five steps to help bring order and clarity to planning and delivering each communications project.

The five steps you need to create a campaign using OASIS are:

• Objectives
• Audience/Insight
• Strategy/Ideas
• Implementation
• Scoring/Evaluation

The idea is to use this process of constant learning to refresh your approach as you go.

8. Deciding what to measure

Do you know how your communications are working now? What things are worth measuring and why? These are questions you should consider when deciding how you will measure whether your tactics are delivering your objectives.

One way to measure your communications is to think about the journey someone takes when they use any service. First, you become aware of service. Then you think about using it. Then you do use it and, if it meets your needs, you then use it repeatedly. You might even become an advocate, telling others about it.

Other factors you should consider

This guide is not exhaustive. There will be other considerations that you might want to articulate as part of your strategy. These considerations include:

Resources:

• Who will lead on this work?
• Will delivery be in-house, or will an agency do it?
• What is the total budget required?
• Is this funding already in place?

Risks:

• What are the risks of what you are planning to do?
• Are these risks likely? And if yes, what would be the impact?
• What can we do to reduce any impact?
• What assumptions underlie this strategy and have they been tested?