What I learned writing an organization's first communications plan
A strategy document is only worth writing if it changes what happens on a Tuesday. Here's what made the difference between a plan that got used and one that would have been filed.
The first communications plan an organization writes is rarely the best one it will ever have. That’s fine. Its job isn’t to be perfect — it’s to give everyone something to argue with.
Before I wrote ours, communications decisions were made one at a time. Not badly; just independently. Somebody would ask for a flyer, and the question of who it was for and how it connected to anything else got answered fresh, in the moment, usually well. But solving the same problem repeatedly is expensive, and it makes it very hard to build anything that compounds.
Write for the Tuesday, not for the board meeting
The temptation with a strategy document is to make it impressive. Frameworks, matrices, a mission-adjacent paragraph at the top that no one will read twice.
I set a different test: does this change what a person does on a normal Tuesday? If a section didn’t survive that question, it got cut. What made it through was concrete — which audiences matter, which channels actually reach them, what’s happening in which month, and how we’ll know if it worked.
The calendar did more than the strategy
If I could keep only one artifact from the whole project, it would be the annual calendar.
A calendar makes the gaps visible. Once you can see the whole year at once, you notice the quiet months, the seasonal moments you’d otherwise scramble at, and the campaigns that are all landing in the same three weeks. Nearly every proactive project I’ve started since came out of looking at that calendar and noticing an empty space where something should be.
Measurement is permission to change your mind
The evaluation section felt like the least interesting part to write and has turned out to be the most useful. Not because the numbers are dramatic, but because having agreed in advance on what we’re watching means adjusting the plan is a normal act rather than an admission that the first version was wrong.
Which it was, in places. That’s what a first plan is for.
Written by Lindsay Mauss. If this was useful, or you disagree with it, say so.