Like a lot of people, I found myself facing an identity crisis post-pandemic. In March 2020 I left my physical office in an old academic building to hide from an invisible virus while figuring out how to launch a website remotely that had taken 2+ years at that point. A few years later, I find myself in a new role with a much more broad career focus, as well as being a full-time remote-working first-time dad. I will forever look at this time through the lens of before and after.
Many of my perceptions about myself and the world were changed from that moment in time (for better or for worse). For organizations, circumstances are no different. Your internal stakeholders and your external audiences have evolved as have their perceptions of your organization. This is true over any period of time, especially the decade that the last few years were…
It’s a great time to do a communications audit if you haven’t done one in a while.
In this post, I’m going to share a high-level overview of why you should do a comms audit, what it entails, and what you can expect after you complete it. This is a one-size-fits-most plan, with plenty of room on the edges for customization depending on your organization and its goals. I’ll also add that if you do some Googling on the topic you’ll find advice on how to do an external audit and separate advice on how to do an internal audit.
I happen to hold the very controversial opinion that in practice, you use the same framework for both, just with different objectives and audiences. If you execute a comms audit correctly, you can actually get really valuable insight and actionable feedback for improving both internal and external communications.
What is a communications audit?
Generally speaking, a communications audit is a process that every organization should go through regularly to take the temperature on the effectiveness of their communications strategies and tactics. This should be a process you do every few years, not unlike developing a long-term strategic plan. The audit should identify what is working and not working for an organization and give actionable steps for improvement and refinement. The audit should give you the tools you need to improve your work so you’re doing a better job reaching the people you want to reach with the messages you’re trying to say.
What are the benefits of conducting a communications audit?
You should go into this knowing that an audit isn’t “free,” even if you do all the work in-house. It takes time and resources to do correctly and will take several months in most cases to do well. But it’s so worth it. The main benefit of an audit is that you’ll be able to narrow the gap between perceptions of your organization and reality. You’ll be able to recalibrate your messaging, brand identity, and how you work within a portfolio of channels to identify clearer objectives and ultimately aim closer at your organization’s mission.
The main benefit of an audit is that you’ll be able to narrow the gap between perceptions of your organization and reality.
Steps to complete a communications audit
Every audit requires an individualized approach so my disclaimer before we begin is very much that individual mileage may vary. How successful you are with an audit depends on the characteristics of your organization and its capacity to complete these steps.
But here’s my suggested road map.
(And of course, feel free to reach out if you’d like some help putting all of this together)
1. Start with your mission
All of your efforts should point towards your mission. Your raison d’être. The purpose of your organization’s existence. Have you identified your values? Are they still the same? Do you know what your goals are? Don’t worry about things like your logo or the open rate of your newsletter yet. If these aren’t aligned then no communications audit can fix this problem. Organizational leadership should be part of this kickoff. For example, if we’re talking about a nonprofit organization then this needs to be discussed among the C-Suite and Board. All of the work from this point forward is going to be based on your mission.
2. Identify your audience
Figure out who your audiences are. Who are your key stakeholders (internal AND external)? These are customers. Fans. Advocates. Decision-makers. Community members. Policymakers. Influencers. Media outlets. Employees. Not all are created equal and you don’t have the capacity to target all of them equally. Some groups are going to be more important than others, and that is okay.
Ask a lot of questions as you identify these groups. Have you segmented them correctly? Who would you prioritize for what messages and why? Are there overlaps between groups? What do you *think* they think of you? What do they expect from you? What keeps them up at night? What is the aspirational, best-possible relationship they can have with you?
3. Research
This phase will take the longest. Your objective in this phase is to eventually abandon any opinions you have. I recommend starting locally—that is within your own communications team (if applicable). Ask yourselves what you think the perception of your organization is among employees. Among customers or external audiences? How do you describe and define your brand?
You’ll also want to catalog all of your channels/publications/messages/brand assets (logos, brand guidelines, images, etc.). Try to put keep this in a centralized, organized place so you can easily reflect on your work after collecting data and see how aligned you were and where you can make improvements moving forward. Assume you are about to be surprised and try to be Zen about it. This is okay. This is what the work IS.
Next, look to your own employees to collect data. You want to get answers to the same questions but from their perspectives, especially from other working areas outside of a communications/marketing team. Tactics for this include distributing surveys, conducting focus groups, and facilitating town halls or open forums.
Now you have to move externally. This can be trickier since, unlike internal stakeholders, you can’t rely on your organization’s leadership to push folks to participate. The same tactics work externally—you just need to be specific with your audiences (see step 2 above). For example, if you’re a college (or a unit within a college), segment a survey to parents, prospective students, current students, alumni, local employers, etc.
One of my pet peeves is getting bombarded with requests for filling out surveys or submitting reviews for basically doing anything online without getting anything in return. So if you are able, please offer some incentives. Your participation numbers will improve and so will the quality of your data. It could be something as simple as raffling some Amazon gift cards. Or if you do in-person research (like focus groups), pay folks for their time and provide some snacks or a boxed lunch.
Lastly, don’t forget to collect and organize your hard data for channel performance. This includes website analytics, email performance, social media engagement, paid media performance, earned media placements, and more. In other words, if you have a presence in a channel collect the data if you can.
You’ll want the full report at this stage to be qualitative AND quantitative.
4. Analyze, analyze, analyze
Now you have the data (which was the easy part). The next step is to make sense of it. Sometimes you’ll want to conduct a good old-fashioned SWOT (strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to set the foundation for your work moving forward. This can be a good tabletop exercise for building the report which is coming next. Sometimes a SWOT analysis gets a little murky with knowing if an idea is an S,W,O, or T. I like to remember that strengths and weaknesses are always internal whereas opportunities and threats are always external.
At this stage you can finally get some answers to your questions. Were the perceptions of your brand aligned among your key audiences? Why or why not? What channels are working really well for you and what aren’t? What campaigns went well in the last few years and what didn’t?
Where were there gaps between what you wanted to say, what you said, and what your audience heard?
As you answer these questions you’re going to rethink your approach to some of the work you’ve been doing. For example, you may re-evaluate your channels. Another controversial opinion I have as a professional communicator is that in an age of endless channels and outlets, you should know that you can always say no if something isn’t working. Or you can “quiet quit” a channel that takes a lot of work to maintain and you aren’t getting much in return for it. What I mean is, you can use an automation tool to distribute or x-post links to multiple places at once. Twitter comes to mind as a good candidate for this, especially in the context of what’s happening on bird app these days, but you can apply this logic anywhere. There are tools to create an automated email digest of news stories, for example. It just depends on your organization, your messages, and your target audiences.
For example, Red Bull does well on Snapchat but probably not so great with an email newsletter. Conversely, Vanguard doesn’t have a Snapchat account but they have very informative and useful newsletters for investors. Know your audience, know yourself, and pick the right medium to make that connection.
5. Final report and deliverables
You’re going to make some changes after you’ve done this process. Maybe you discovered that the news articles on your website are too long and web visitors rarely scroll to the end of them. Or in a survey you find out that your audience wants more long-form stories. Or you discover that your photos aren’t very good and you want to hire some professionals to do work that may be traditionally done in-house. The point is that if changes don’t happen, the comms audit didn’t do its job.
Here are the deliverables that you should try to emerge with at the end of this process:
- A report and executive summary:
- This executive summary should be a high-level overview of your findings and recommendations for the decision-makers in your organization and other HIPPOs. The extended report is for the people doing the actual work. You’ll want a plan for presenting your report too. Be prepared—it’s highly unlikely you’ll emerge from this project without realizing you need to make some changes and need more resources. Possible, but highly unlikely.
- An updated brand guide/plan for making updates (OR) the framework you need to begin building a brand guide.
- An updated design system/plan for making updates (OR) the framework you need to begin building a design system.
- A short- and long-term communications strategic plan (OR) all the information you need to build a really good one.
- This might be the next step in the process depending on how you view the “end” of a comms audit. This plan will chart your course. It should identify your communications goals as an organization, grounded in your mission and vision and set clear objectives for your work.
- (I’ll be sharing a template for this in the next few weeks on this blog)
- Evaluation tools connected to your new objectives.
- You want these established ahead of time so you’re prepared for the next communications audit. It’ll be time to do it again before you know it.
You got this. And if you need some expert assistance, feel free to send me a note.
Bonus
Check out some great resources from the National School Public Relations Association.