Evaluating Your Strategic Communications Plan

In a television newsroom, it’s called a Post Mortem. First responders call it a Hot Wash. But no matter what name you give it, it’s the most important after-action event in your Strategic Communication Plan.

People learn a lot when they perform a task. It doesn’t matter if you are competing in sports or rolling out an integrated marketing communications plan. Things will happen that you didn’t expect, and things you expected won’t happen at all. Good planners will take those lessons and tweak their Strategic Communications Plans in order to improve performance the next time out.

Test Before You Deploy

If your plan is a crisis response plan, or some similar “What If” program, try to test the various elements of your plan before you’re compelled to use it. Such tests might include:

• Mock Press Conference
• A Game Based on the Plan (actually do what you plan for)
• Test Your Call-Down Tress

These simple exercises can identify holes you need to plug or procedures that you can streamline.

Of course, this works best for plans that are designed to meet a contingency. Some Strategic Communications Plans are built to roll out and function to long periods of time. In such a case, exercising your plan might not be practical. However, there could still be areas that could benefit from a pre-event exercise. Consider this option, but once your plan concludes, you have to analyze its performance. For that, it is important to round-table with your key stakeholders.

Meet Within Two Weeks

After you deploy your communications plan, no matter what its scale or scope, schedule a meeting with all of your key stakeholders in order to discuss what went right and what went wrong. This meeting isn’t designed to lay blame, but to share perceptions, discover problems, and improve procedures.

• What did we do that worked?
• What did we do that did not work?
• Did this plan achieve its stated objective from your viewpoint?
• Did this plan introduce unexpected benefits or problems?

While this is not an exhaustive list of questions to ask your key stakeholders, you will open conversations and brainstorming that will help everyone in the end.

Why two weeks? I’ve discovered that this period of time keeps the event fresh in people’s minds while removing any emotion that might have developed during the course of the event.

Here are other articles I have written on this topic:

• New Campaign for Will County Health Department
• The Art of Cleaning Up a Mess
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 10: Team Briefing
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 7: Social Media Checklist
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 6: Reporters’ Notebook
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 5: Test Your Call Tree
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 4: Notify Stakeholders
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 3: Verify Your Contacts
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 2: Your Message
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 1: Influenza Update