Communications planning
“Having a communication strategy and plan is essential to ensure that your messaging is consistent and tells a unified story that ties back to your overall mission and objectives,”
Here we offer an introduction to planning your communications as a chaplaincy or congregation.
Communication can be divided into internal communication and external communication.
- Internal communication involves communicating with members of your congregation, as well as staff or volunteers.
- External communication include messages directed towards people outside your congregation, maybe within your wider community.
Good communications need to be organised, developed, and built. The first step in the process is to create a communications strategy.
Don’t let resources or time constraints keep you from setting objectives, identifying your most important audiences or thinking about how to keep these audiences engaged so that you can sustain and spread your work.
A strategy focuses on the big picture: the what, why and who you need to focus on in order to effectively reach your audience. This should fit in with your plan or strategy for your chaplaincy as a whole.
A strategy is related to, but different from, your communications plan. A communications plan sets out the actions you will take as a result of your strategy: the how and when of communicating to your audiences.