When a charity asks me for a communications strategy, they’ve usually already decided what’s
wrong. The website’s out of date and nobody opens the newsletter, and they’d like a document
that sorts it out.

Sometimes that’s exactly what they need. Quite often it isn’t, and I can only tell by looking at a
few things before anybody writes a word of strategy.

What the organisation is saying, and to whom

I start with what the organisation has decided matters most, and whether the people doing the
work would say the same thing. A comms strategy is meant to help an organisation get where
it’s going. If nobody agrees where that is, I can write you something lovely and it will sit in a
shared drive for two years. I’ve seen plenty of those, and early on I probably wrote one or two
myself.

Then I read everything I can get my hands on. The website, the last annual report, the last few
funding applications, the leaflet on the reception desk, the email that goes to new volunteers.
I’m looking for whether it all sounds like the same organisation, and very often it doesn’t. The
website says one thing, the last funding bid says something slightly different, and the team have
pieced together a third version from whatever they needed that week. That isn’t a criticism of
anybody, because it happens in every busy organisation. But it means supporters and funders
meet a slightly different charity every time they look, and producing more content just spreads
the confusion further.

I also look at who’s actually paying attention, which is often quite different from who the plan
says the audience is. That means who opens the emails and who gives more than once, rather
than how many people follow you. A lot of small charities have a loyal core of supporters who
hear from them least, because all the energy goes into trying to reach new people.

Who’s actually going to do it

Then I look very hard at capacity. Who is going to do this, and how many hours a week do they
have once the urgent stuff is done? Nobody much likes talking about it, but it’s what decides
whether a strategy gets used. If your comms person is also your volunteer coordinator and the
only person who understands the CRM, a strategy that assumes three posts a day is a work of
fiction.

I ask what’s been tried before, too, and why it stopped. There’s nearly always a newsletter that
ran for eight months, a campaign that was going to be annual, a brand refresh that got about
halfway. I find those useful, because they tell you what happens to good ideas in this particular
organisation. Usually what ran out was time, or the one person who was driving it left.

Whether you need a strategy at all

By the time I’ve done all that, I can usually tell you whether you need a communications
strategy. Sometimes you do. Sometimes what you need first is a decision about priorities, or just
another pair of experienced hands for a year. Writing a strategy when the real problem is
capacity is a waste of your money, and I’d much rather say so at the start.

If you’re thinking about commissioning one, you can do a rough version of this yourself before
you talk to anyone. Put the last three things your organisation published side by side and read
them as if you’d never heard of the charity. Then write down how many hours a week anyone
really has for comms once the urgent stuff is done. If either of those surprises you, take it into
your first conversation with whoever you hire, whether that’s me or someone else.