Communication Plan Template: Effective Tips

No matter what business you’re in, having an effective communication plan can mean the difference between success and failure.

Being able to communicate quickly and easily with all stakeholders on your team is important, even if you’re not in a crisis situation.

Here are a few tips to help you put together a communication plan template that will meet your organization’s needs and allow a free flow of ideas and information.

While designing your template, the first thing you should focus upon is a list of goals and objectives your plan needs to accomplish.

Remember, a goal is a broad intention that is not usually subject to measurement. Objectives are specific things to aim for to be successful.

For example, you may have a goal to increase your company’s positive reputation. One of your objectives, then, might be to have mostly 4- and 5-star reviews on Amazon, or to see a decrease in return requests.

For best results, make a list of specific goals and objectives for each audience you’ll be communicating with. Every audience will have its own special relationship with you as the communicator.

What is necessary information for one, may be irrelevant or redundant for another. You want to avoid overburdening your audiences with unnecessary information.

Stakeholders are anyone with whom you need to communicate — they are also called audiences. Your audiences can include customers, employees, vendors, or even a mix of individuals.

You can subdivide audiences by group. For example, if one audience is “employees,” you may have several sub-audiences such as “human resources employees” and “IT employees.”

The more specific you can be with your audiences, the more effective your plan will be. Some individuals will end up in several audiences, and this is okay.

Ask these questions when clarifying objectives:

For example, let’s take the “human resources employees” audience for the example, above. The answers to the questions for that audience might look something like this:

Unless there’s a crisis, you should have your information planned out well in advance, along with the means of communicating it.

Use your stakeholder objectives to tailor messages for each audience, then make a list of channels you can use to communicate your message.

Examples of typical channels include:

An example of a PACE plan for communicating a public service message might be as follows:

You want to be sure your communication plan template is as effective as possible.

It’s best to monitor its effectiveness at regular intervals by surveying audience members regarding the following objectives:

With this kind of detailed communications plan template, you’ll have the appropriate tools available to share information with all members of your team in a timely and consistent manner.

Keeping all your teams updated with the latest policies and changes in direction will allow them, and you, to react quickly as situations arise.

This will give you a competitive edge over organizations that are slow to act on market shifts and changes in customer perception.

Remember to review your communication plan at regular intervals to update objectives, audiences, and channels of communication as necessary.

Your organization will grow and change as objectives and goals are met and exceeded, generating a need for a brand-new template in order to keep those channels of communication clear and open.