Communications Strategy: Reaching Your Audience and Your Goals
Having a coherent, mission-driven communication strategy is crucial to supporting and advancing your organization’s mission. When you don’t, your communications activities are invariably reactive, scattered and piecemeal. Sound familiar?
Building a comprehensive communications strategy takes time and resources. But even if your budget or bandwidth don’t allow for robust research and planning phases, there are some basic, actionable ideas that will make your communications efforts more effective, cohesive and compelling.
Start by asking yourself these questions:
- What are you trying to accomplish? Establish goals and specific, measurable objectives.
- Who are you trying to reach? Define and segment your target audience.
- Does your message resonate? Speak to their interests, needs, and values.
- What do you want them to do? Make sure the call to action is clear.
- How and when are you communicating with them? Choose audience-centric tools and channels.
You don’t have to have everything all figured out at once. Keeping these basics in mind as you develop your communications pieces will help you improve as you go and build out your communications strategy over time.
