Determine the issues related to an organization's external communications.
Identify:
- messages we want to convey to stakeholders
- information needed from stakeholders
- how we want stakeholders to behave so we can meet our objectives. (Create a conceptual model of the desired behaviour, and work out what steps are necessary for it to be attained.)
Resources needed: participants (this works best with 6 to 30 of them), a room with plenty of wall space, big paper, marker pens, whiteboard, scribe (with laptop?). Example of previous communications output from the organization (let's call it HB).
Session 1 (~30 minutes)
Consider the past. What are the "prouds and sorries" of HB communications? What lessons are there to be applied for the future? How can the best of the past be kept, and any mistakes be avoided in future?
Write each + and - on an A4 sheet with a thick marker, and put it on the wall.
Session 2 (~30 minutes)
Who are the stakeholders? Who are HB trying to communicate with? Name key individual organizations or people, and group the rest into homogeneous categories.
Which agencies / people / groups need to communicate with HB for it to fulfil its objectives?
Use the Stakeholder Star as a framework.
Output: a grouped list of stakeholders (roles, not necessarily individuals or agencies).
For each stakeholder (or group), consider:
- What do we want from them? What are we trying to tell them?
- What do they want from us? What are they trying to tell us?
- What's the power relationship?
Session 3 (~40 minutes)
What are the issues? What info do we have that we want to get to stakeholders? (Bring all available documents etc, specially lists of other documents distributed)
Sort these into similar issues, then group them, using KJ method etc.
Session 4 (~20 minutes)
Build a matrix of stakeholders by issues. If there are 10 stakeholder groups and 10 issue groups, the matrix will have 100 cells (but many can probably be combined).
Session 5 (~30 minutes)
Work through each cell of the matrix. For each stakeholder, each issue, consider:
- Is this issue relevant for HB's communication with this stakeholder?
- If so, produce a relevance rating: 1 if above average, 0 if below average:
- urgent (1) or not (0)
- important (1) or not (0)
- easy for us (1) or not (0)
- cheap (1) or not (0)
- quick to do (1) or not (0)
- any barriers that might stop this from being effective (1) or not (0)?
What are the types of documents appropriate for communicating with this group? For each document type: what documents are involved, what format/s should they be in (print, web, etc), and what will be the cost of producing each set?
Sum up relevance rating for each issue: 0 to 6. Compare all issues, and change figures if misleading. Use these ratings to assign priorities for next item.
Session 6 (~90 minutes)
For each key stakeholder/issue combination with a high relevance rating, consider
a. What behaviour do we want from them on this issue?
b. What types of messages need to flow, to encourage that behaviour?
c. How should we communicate those messages? (E.g. pamphlet, Web, video)
d. Can we communicate with those stakeholders directly - or do others need to carry our message?
e. How can we know if this communication is effective - i.e. the message they get is the same as the message we are trying to send?
f. How well is this issue being communicated to this stakeholder at the moment? (What evidence exists for that belief?)
g. What do they want from us?
h. How can we hear their voices?
(1) Stakeholder map - all stakeholder groups (often about 8 of them) arranged in a star, with the organization at the centre. Lines between groups (in either direction) show communication
(2) Table givine details of each line on the stakeholder map, with separate rows for inwad and outward communication. Details include type, mode, frequency, and volume of each communication type, for each pair of stakeholders, in each direction.
Clear view of the communications strategy and linkages of the various components to provide a grounding for a communications plan. Where our jobs fit into it; contribute info for a strategic communications plan and action plan.
Related pages on this site: the communications audit and program logic modelling.