Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop

#CommsStrategy

30 May 2012

Evaluating & Adapting Your Communications Strategy

Gerry Tissier

Your vision

• Where do you want to go to with your communications?• Get yourself known• Keep yourself in front of people’s minds• Make your charity stand out• Help people understand what you do• Get people to support you• Change society• Which outcomes are most important to you?

Your structure

AWARENESS

UNDERSTANDING

SUPPORT & ENGAGEMENT

CHANGE & INFLUENCE

Awareness

• You won’t get noticed if you don’t get out and about

• Spend• Turn up the volume• Go for profile• Play it again• Keep it fresh• Do it a lot and do it often

Understanding

• Portray an image• Tell a story• Fashion images and words • Frame messages• Build ‘understanding’• Have a conversation

Engagement

• Propensity to support charity• Comms strands – ads, PR, social media, marketing…• Donations, contacts, website visits, volunteering,

campaigning…• Econometric modelling

Influence

• Social change - the ultimate goal for many charities• Influencing governments • Changing the way people think and behave• The path - awareness, concern, support, action • Complex set of factors involved over long periods• Difficult to measure impact of communications

Measuring Awareness

• Audience surveys• Spontaneous, front-of-mind awareness• Prompted awareness• Total awareness • Recall of communications • Setting KPIs for outputs and first-level outcomes

Measuring Understanding

• Perceptions and understanding of your brand • Character, personality & identity • Trust, confidence, effectiveness, relevancy….• Changing the way people think and feel about you• Precursors to support and engagement• Off-the-shelf v tailored surveys

Measuring Support

• Counting the number of interactions with your charity• Donors, callers, visitors, fundraisers, followers and fans • Response generated from comms and value of response• Online, digital and social media evaluation • Correlating comms activities with types of engagement• Econometric modelling

Measuring Change &Influence

• What outcomes, over what period of time?• Areas of focus and specific attitudes and behaviours• From what people think about issues to how they act • ‘Clunk Click Every Trip’ to Make Poverty History• Evaluating the impact of campaigns• Long term impact of communications on long term trends• Has anyone robustly measured this yet?

Adapting yourstrategy

• Scorecards, dashboards and reports• KPI milestones• Communicate more to maintain or grow awareness, • Refine your messages to build your brand• Choose channels to drive support & engagement • Track audience response to your campaigns• A communications strategy must hang as one body