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Figure 3: Delivery communications plan template

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Figure 3: Delivery communications plan template

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Your communications can impact people in different ways. Consider what you would want your audience to think, feel, or do if you were to successfully communicate with them. Figure 1, below, presents the communications objectives for the fuel poverty programme outreach drive.

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Scroll back up and across to view Step 3.

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Scroll back up and across to view Step 2.

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You've reached the end of the process. Return to the lesson page to discover how to drive communications throughout the delivery effort.

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Your milestones (only select a few over a 12 month period) serve as checkpoints at which you will need to update key stakeholders or gather their input. You can use your objective and key message to develop a consistent plan for what you want to communicate to stakeholders and when.

Figure 3, below, shows what a template of a communications plan looks like, which is followed by an application to the fuel poverty programme in Figure 4. As you can see, the plan does not need a lot of detail; bullet point summaries for each field should be sufficient.

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The next step is to plan your communications with stakeholders over the course of your delivery effort. Now that you’ve set clear objectives and crafted a compelling message, this is where you focus on amplifying your voice throughout the system.

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This is the extra layer of detail which supports the ‘what’ in your message. How will the strategy work in practice; what are your targets and trajectories; what exactly is expected from them? This part of the message supports the ‘do’ element of your objective.

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You need to provide a compelling rationale for your ‘what’.

The ‘why’ in your message should be connected to both a practical and moral purpose. Why does your goal matter for service users; why is this approach the best way to achieve it; why should the stakeholder support you?

The most compelling messages provoke an emotional reaction. think about your objective in Step 1: what do you want them to think or feel.

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Think about how the message will inform your audience.  Are you explaining your goal, how the strategy will work, or what you want them to do? Have a clear takeaway.

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Once you have a clear objective, you need to craft a compelling message to help you achieve it. You will likely need to develop different messages for different priority stakeholders but they should all be consistent and aligned with your goals and strategies. Alternatively, you can form an overarching message, which you adapt slightly for different audiences. Whatever you choose, your message should contain the three elements presented below.

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Clarity of purpose is essential when it comes to planning your communications.

You need a clear idea of what you want to achieve when engaging with key stakeholders. That objective is expressed as the impact you want to have on the stakeholder as a result of your interactions. It should be underpinned by ‘what’ you want to communicate overall.