10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 4: Notify Stakeholders

When developing Strategic Communication Plans, planners forget to account for how their plans might affect other stakeholders. As you prepare for the fall influenza season, it is a good time to communicate elements of your plan that might impact them.

photo credit: Andres Rueda

Evaluate Your Evaluation

As I wrote in Evaluating Your Strategic Communications Plan, you learn a lot when you do something.

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.

What did you learn when you last evaluated your plan? Did that evaluation lead to any change to your Strategic Communications Plan? If so, communicating those changes to Key Stakeholders (if you have not done so already) is an important preventative measure.

• Will suppliers need to change their production or delivery protocols if your company implements its H1N1 plan?
• How will excessive absenteeism impact your customers?
• What is your policy towards business continuity? Have you explained this outside the company?

These, and other questions, are items that you should communicate to Key Stakeholders.

Today’s To-Do: Send Key Stakeholders an Update

There are two types of Key Stakeholders.

• Internal Stakeholders who are individuals or departments within the organization that the plan will impact in the same way a traditional marketing objective might impact both the production and sales divisions within a firm.
• External Stakeholders tend to be organizations rather than individuals that a plan will impact.

Today you need to reach out to both your Internal and External Stakeholders. Explain to them what you have been doing with your plan for seasonal influenza. Provide them with an overview that is specific to their role as stakeholders within the organization. This can come in the form of a phone call to departments within your company, a meeting with certain external stakeholders, or a detailed email (in executive summary form) to all involved.

If you stakeholder list is large, divide the list into groups and work though those groups until everyone has received the latest update. Your stakeholders will appreciate the insight. It might also encourage them to consider their own planning and preparation.

Here are other articles I have written on this topic:

• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 1: Influenza Update
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 7: Social Media Checklist
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 5: Test Your Call Tree
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 2: Your Message
• Writing a Strategic Communications Plan: Evaluation
• Why You Should Be Proactive with Bad News
• Three Things People Want to Know in a Crisis
• New Campaign for Will County Health Department
• The Art of Cleaning Up a Mess
• 10 Day Tune Up for H1N1 – Day 10: Team Briefing