To Find New Opportunities, Start With a Communication Audit

Whether you work for a for-profit or nonprofit enterprise, you’re doing something right now to communicate with key stakeholders – customers, employees, members, prospects. When was the last time you took a hard, objective look at those ongoing communications? If you can’t remember, it may be time for a communication audit to analyze current internal and external communications -- and compare how you want your organization to be perceived by key publics to how it is actually perceived.

  • Step 1: Analyze your firm’s key publics or stakeholders. Have they changed in any way? For example, today’s prospective customers or members may routinely find information of interest via apps, rather than by reading print newsletters or clicking into your website. Go where your audience goes.
  • Step 2: Analyze the competitive environment. Are you jockeying for attention with the New York Times or reality TV? Can you benchmark other organizations that do a great job of communicating with similar audiences?
  • Step 3: What’s the current state of affairs? Is your website easy to navigate? Does your e-newsletter have "news you can use" in every issue? In an ideal world, will your communications inform, change opinion or move readers to action? What do your stakeholders think of your organization? Don’t rely on your own opinion – this is where you mobilize one-on-one interviews, focus groups and surveys to inform decisions.
  • Step 4: Use communication audit data to build support for necessary change.

This last step can be difficult, no matter how compelling your audit results may be. For example, the decision-maker at one public company did not want to change the 15-year-old website “because no one is complaining about it.” Additional objections included a) cost and b) more pressing priorities elsewhere. As an interim step, we obtained approval to write new copy and reorganize existing copy – no financial outlay or aesthetically desirable redesign required. The reorganized website ranked highly in a subsequent survey of site visitors.

In contrast, a communication audit for a nonprofit organization generated strong board support and meaningful change. The audit focused on existing communications to an influential subset of the membership. As a result of the audit, the organization revamped its website to improve readability and ease of finding information; increased the online resources available in a section of the website devoted to the target audience; and increased communication frequency to these members via owned channels and third-party networking and social media sites. The changes were well-received by this subset of members.

15 thoughts on “To Find New Opportunities, Start With a Communication Audit”

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