Communicators: It’s Time to Shift Into Planning Mode

Here at Fox in a Box we use immersive games to help teams connect and build healthy work relationships. However we also like to share tips to use inside of your office to foster productive habits and provide tools and tips to make operations run smoothly! Here are some few key learnings that we would love to share with your team!

As communicators, our work can be unpredictable. Every day can be an adventure, and it often is. Yet, there is real value in developing an annual communication plan with clear goals to guide ourselves, our teams and our business partners.

During the last few years while responding to COVID, social issues, natural disasters and much more, many of us have been in a constant “always on” mode. In some cases, that’s made it difficult or impossible to spend time setting goals and building long-term plans.

If you fall into that camp, don’t worry. You still have time to develop your personal and professional goals for 2024.

A place to start: Four simple questions

If you already have a plan or goals that just need to be updated for next year, great. But what if you don’t have any type of direction set? Where do you start? In that case, the first step is to quickly conduct an audit of what you are doing and why.

Ask yourself these four questions.

1. What are you doing?

2. Why are you doing it?

3. Can you do it better?

4. If so, how?Smart Businesses Use Password Managers

How to leverage your answers for goal-setting

If we know why we’re doing things and have really evaluated if something can be done better that’s a huge component of being successful. Although the answers to the four questions above around any specific issue won’t always be simple, they are worth asking.

Running areas where you spend significant time through those questions helps build a culture of continuous improvement.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if you don’t have a good question to the second question – why you are doing something – it provides the perfect opportunity to stop that task or body of work and shift your focus to something with more value.

Building your annual plan

Once you’ve taken a step back and evaluated your current state of working, you can shift into building a proactive, forward-looking plan. There is no single answer for how long your plan needs to be with supporting information and context, but at minimum, it should define and address all the following areas:

• Goals and objectives: What is your organization trying to achieve and how can your team’s communication efforts support those?

• Target audience: Who are you trying to reach and what actions do you want them to take?

• Key messages: What do you want to say?

• Strategy/tactics: What channels will you use to communicate your messages to your audience?

• Timeline and budget: When will you execute major components of the plan and how much will all it cost?

• Evaluation: How will you measure success and share information with stakeholders?

You may also want to include a SWOT analysis, competitive analysis, and crisis communication elements in your plan.

Once you set your goals and build your plan, it’s important to broadly socialize it. On a quarterly basis –