You can use a paper calendar to keep on your wall or desktop, or go with a computer calendar, which can give you reminders when deadlines are approaching.
Think about the state of your market and the company or project as a whole. Ask yourself what your company or project is doing right, and what it could improve on. For example, you might detail your company’s current sales, its budget outlook, and its projected growth. You could also talk about things like employee and customer satisfaction and retention.
Write down your broad goal in big, bold letters. You’ll want to keep referring to it as you continue creating your communication plan. For example, if you want to move your company away from storefront business and towards digital customers, you could frame it as a way to continue making a viable profit in a changing business landscape.
On your brainstorming sheet, write down your subgoals below your broader goal.
For example, if you’re communicating with a large company and consumer base, you might split your audiences into employees, stakeholders, and customers. If you’re communicating with different audiences, you may need to come up with different strategies for each, since a tactic that works for one group might not be as effective for another. For example, communicating with customer might work best with an image-based approach, while stakeholders might prefer more data and analysis.
For example, let’s say you’re expanding the inventory of a retail company to include children’s clothes as well as adults’. You might need to tell the manufacturing branch the more practical facts of how the change will be implemented and how they’ll need to change their current processes. For a branch that’s less directly impacted, you could focus your messages on the broader impacts of the change.
For example, you might say, “We’ve decided as a company to open up our retail to kids as well as adults. ”
For example, you might say, “As our data team, you know that most of our customers are also parents—about 70% of them. Expanding our inventory to include children’s products allows us to make our existing customers even more satisfied. ”
For example, you might say, “This decision was made by a team comprising of employees and executives from each branch of the company. Expanding our inventory also means increasing workload. We all, and the data team especially, will need to work harder than ever to get this initiative out. In the meantime, we’ll start the hiring process for new analysts to help relieve some of the load. ”
For example, you could say, “We came to this decision after completing several overall reviews of customer satisfaction and engagement. We also sent out surveys to all our customers to see what we can do to retain their business, and opening up a children’s department was overwhelmingly popular. ” When telling a branch how it affects them, you might say, “As our data team, this means that you’ll be pulling information from a new source now: our children’s department. When we first launch, this will mean measuring hits and page retention rates, as well as item to checkout information, and comparing it directly with our men’s and women’s products. ”
You could say something like, “The design team will be starting to develop new products over the next couple of weeks. From there, manufacturing will start producing them. We’ll aim to have our website and first stock ready in 3 months, with a launch date on May 15. Your part in this, as the data team, will start up right around then. ”
For example, if you’re speaking to a team in-person, you simply might say, “Does anyone have questions?” For large-scale changes, you might want to solicit questions over email and hold a follow-up session to discuss them one by one.
Handing out a survey to your audiences, asking them to judge how the information was presented. Measuring investment rates, if you’re communicating with investors Measuring retention rates of customers or employees
