Planning your communication

Identify your audiences

Planning communications works best if you work as a team. Before you start you should think about the different groups of people who want and need to know about your improvement work. Think about their role. For example, do you need their support or are they involved in delivering the work? Using a template to gauge their level of interest and their influence on the success of your improvement work will help to decide who your priority groups are. 

Define the purpose of the communication

You need to be clear about the purpose of your communication. Are you trying to

• engage people with the vision and build will for change
• inform people about the outcomes of the work
• sustain people’s interest
• celebrate success
• share the learning to spread ideas

Identify key messages

What are you trying to say? Be clear, concise, positive and use language that will be understood by your audience. Be clear about what you want people to do after receiving your message.

Winning hearts and minds using stories

To really engage your audiences, you need to win hearts as well as minds. Using facts alone will not achieve this. Telling stories about real people helps improvement work come alive for your audiences. Stories help deliver information, keep people interested and people tend to remember them.

Communication channels

There are different ways for delivering your communication. Some examples include meetings, email, newsletters, presentations, briefings, internet, notice boards, blog, pod cast, word of mouth, websites, social media, newspapers, television. How do your audiences prefer to receive communication? Using the right channel will help you reach your audience.

Sharing what you have learned

If your improvement work has improved outcomes for people, it should be accessible to others to adapt or adopt in their context. Planning your communications at the outset is an important factor in successfully sustaining and spreading improvements.