Large organisations have the luxury of separate departments to manage the many conversations they have with their audience. Their corporate communications team looks after media, annual reports, lobby activity, and general company news. Whilst the marketing department covers their brand, product or service messages to customers, prospects, and partners, and the human resources team concentrates on the employee conversations with top management’s blessing. In reality the conversations and relationships with the internal and external audiences are all related and benefit from internal coordination to manage them best.
Although it's great if you're in a large organisation, but what happens if you don’t have multiple resources to share the communications load?
When you manage the communications by yourself, or with a small support team, you face two options. You’re either run into the ground trying to do it all or you see-saw your attention between internal and external communications. While external communications focus is up, the internal communications effort down, and visa versa.
Managing communications with a small team
Without a superhero in the mix, you can only physically do so much. The first step is to ensure visibility of what you’re doing and what’s being asked of you. Start with a mind map with you in the centre and all your audiences around you. Create branches for all the main topics your audience wants to know about. When you notice different audiences have the same ‘need to know’ colour code these topics. They become key communication themes to connect the internal and external audience messages. Share this high level view and key themes with your management to highlight the key messages to share with multiple stakeholders. Use the map to demonstrate how the themes relate to each other and how, when done together, they support the message being heard and acted upon.
Once you have consensus on the need to communicate on a certain theme, then consider the topic from each stakeholders’ perspective. Be clear on the objective. Then break it down to answer the who, what, where, how, when and why questions. This is where creating personas can help.
Using personas to map out communications
You might already use personas for your customers or prospects, so why not do it for your internal audience too? Not only for your employees, for your managers too. Every audience you communicate with is your customer. Thinking this way ensures the message answers ‘what’s in it for me?’ from their perspective, not yours.
Some considerations for persona development:
· What are their goals?
· What do they want to achieve?
· What action do they have to take?
· How do they think? How do they see the world?
· What’s the best way to reach them?
· How is the information relevant to them?
· Who are their influencers?
· When do they need to know this?
When you consider each audience individually it’s easier to anticipate the type questions they would ask and answer them before they do. Using personas is valuable as you can invite others to provide input to ensure you have them right.
Although the message you have to share internally and externally might be the same, the perspective of the different audiences will definitely impact what you need to tell them. For instance, for a new business acquisition, employees might be concerned about their jobs or hopeful of career opportunities. Alternatively, a new business acquisition could interest customers because you can now offer an enhanced service to benefit them. Although the themes remain the same, the content of the internal and external messages will vary.
Keep the communications see-saw balanced
No matter who’s in charge of communications, be guided by your strategy and keep the communications consistent in message and execution to all audiences. An integrated communications effort never goes out of fashion. In fact, your effort is strengthened when all external and internal communications activities dovetail into each other. It also greatly benefits your brand from a consistency and continuity perspective. When there’s a lack of brand consistency it’s evident across all your brand touch points from the visuals, the company language in written and oral form, to the brand experiences you deliver.
Communications inconsistency creates unnecessary tension and over time something will snap if how your company projects externally varies from what’s being said internally. The closer the two sides are aligned, the more harmonious the communications management effort and it's less likely any gaffs will occur. Employees want to make sense of what they hear internally with what your company says externally. Customers want to know what they're told matches what your employees tell them when they do business with you.
Ingredients to balance the communications see-saw:
· be guided by your strategy
· understand your audience
· align your internal and external comms, close any gaps
· demonstrate your customer focus
· keep consistent in message and execution
