It’s great to commission an independent review of your communications activity every few years but that isn’t always practical or affordable. So, is it possible to deliver a short, sharp communications audit of your own team? Yes, in a word. And my simple ‘5 I’s’ model might be a good place to start…
by Darren Caveney
Run through this simple 5-step audit plan as a team exercise to get some useful audit data and benchmarks to assess your own performance.
Consider how you would score yourself out of 10 for each of these 5 steps – this isn’t an exact science but will quickly flag up your strengths and weaknesses.
1. Insight
You’re busy. Probably busier than you’ve ever been before. So, it’s important to review all individual requests and work demands flowing into the team each week/month – calculate what percentage of this demand is genuinely priority work and report this insight back to your senior leadership team. They need to know if you are being pulled away from the agreed big-ticket item work and this data, in turn, might help you say ‘no’ and switch that demand tap off a little.
Once you know your priorities, assess the insights you have access to – does this data help you form specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely (SMART) objectives? Are there any gaps in your necessary knowledge? If so where can you create your own bespoke insight, and where and when should you consider commissioning fresh research? Who can help you with this insight – do the skills exist in-house or do you need support from an agency? Of course, budget may not exist but solid insight can make the difference between a winning campaign or a comms flop. So, push hard for sound and helpful insights. If a job’s worth doing…
2. Innovation
There are some known knowns around creativity and one thing is for sure – your best creative work is unlikely to stand a chance of emerging in a busy office setting, distracted by emails, phone calls, meetings and colleagues asking you questions all day long.
So, understand how your best work is created - and where – and ensure that your creativity is encouraged and that enough time is given over to thinking, trying and testing. This may be in a coffee shop, in a library, at home or somewhere inspiring like working outdoors or in an art gallery.
A question to ask yourself is this: What is the best thing you have created and delivered in the past 12 months? Where did your creative thinking and planning work for it take place? Understand this and then aim to replicate it as a location for all of your key pieces of work for the rest of the year.
3. Implementation
It’s essential to have a plan that you and your team work to. It can be simple or complex – you’ll know best what is most appropriate for you. Map out the priorities or campaigns within it and understand - in detail - the resources needed to deliver the priorities. Are they available to you? If not this needs to be flagged early as it’s a critical success factor.
Most importantly is your plan signed off by those at the top? Try to get their signatures and mugshots onto page 2 as a foreword to your plan and something to point to when you experience services trying to pull you away from what has been agreed. This can be powerful.
Regular reviews of this plan are essential and will highlight pressure points and risks early on. The best way of managing risks is to remove them – so if your organisation values your work ask them for support in managing or removing these risks so that your implementation stage is effective and focussed. You’ll be looked upon more favourably for managing your work in this way so be across your implementation plan with simple and regular reviews.
4. Impact
This is obviously key in answering the classic chief executive question: “So what?”
We know we have to prove our worth so measuring the impact of your key outcomes is critical. If you’ve set sound objectives it should be fairly straightforward. What did you set out to deliver and have you delivered it? Outputs are fine – they can tell a story about your journey and provide useful benchmarking stats to contrast with previous campaigns. But we all know that outcomes are the real comms prize so ensure that you are demonstrating how your work made a difference. Can you demonstrate a financial return? Even better if your time spent has been cost neutral because of the £income you have generated or £savings delivered.
So, review your impact for the year to date: Will it impress your senior leaders? Are you personally pleased with it? Is it worthy of an award entry? These are the benchmarks to aim for.
5. Inform
Make sure you are creating a short, visual, headline monthly report to those who matter most internally.
Be honest – do you do this every month? If you’re not those above may not know what you are delivering and, therefore, your worth to the organisation. That’s not a good place to be.
Make this the most important part of your activities – ensure that the whole team are contributing to this report and block out your diary at the start of each month to ensure it gets done. If you have access to a designer get them to create a smart, simple visual template which is easy-read and which flags your achievements against your priority work right at the top of the report. Don’t focus on outputs like media enquiries received or how many people watched a video – pull out the really chunky and meaningful outcomes which will win you praise. You owe it to yourself and your team to tell your own story well here.
Try out the 5 I’s –How did you score yourself out of 50? I’d love to know how you get on.
