Toolkit

Communications are a critical piece of any organization or government agency’s success and can help build trust and transparency with the public. To develop an effective communications program, it’s important to recognize that every agency has different communication needs and therefore requires a unique communications framework. A small local government agency may be able to integrate communications into everyday operations, while a large federal agency with complex stakeholder relationships might require an entire communications team. 

Regardless of your agency’s communications needs, if you’ve come to a point where you believe you could benefit from a focused communications program, this toolkit can help you get there. You can apply the tips in this toolkit to communications programs of any scale. If your agency is smaller or does not have the resources to build a communications team, you might bring on one dedicated communications professional or work these suggestions into existing team member’s duties. If you’re part of a large agency, you can build out a communications team using this framework.

As your organization matures and your communications scale, following a human-centered framework and reinforcing partnerships with stakeholders will ensure success. This means providing the public with consistent, repeatable messaging and processes. Once agencies adopt a human-centered communications framework, they can then support marketing, outreach, change, and operational communications.

Step 1: Shaping your message

In order to communicate effectively, you need to have a clear understanding of what’s important to your organization, its mission, and your audience. This will enable you to shape your message in a way that aligns with audience and organizational needs. 

When shaping a message, here are some important questions to consider: 

• What is your organization's mission?

• How do you deliver value to the public?

• How can you align with the organization’s big picture strategy? 

One way to help shape your message is by drafting a value proposition. This is a statement that outlines your organization's value to the public, beneficiaries, customers, and other stakeholders. A value proposition provides a structure that enables you to speak consistently about the benefits your agency delivers.

Developing clear and compelling key messages that effectively communicate the goals and benefits of your organization can help keep all stakeholders aligned with a narrative throughout your communications program. 

Pro tip: It can be helpful to order key messages by importance to organize the information. Key messages can be useful for both internal and external audiences

Step 2: Getting to know your audience

Knowing who you are constructing your communications program for enables you to target messages toward their needs. To accomplish this, you can use human-centered design practices to define different audience personas. 

An audience persona is a composite character who embodies your target audience and is based on research and data about your ideal audience. It’s a snapshot of all the relevant information you can obtain about them, including key information such as a name, description, demographics, needs, motivations, pain points, and their journey with your organization. Communications often have several key audience personas, and it can be helpful to divide audiences into primary, secondary, and tertiary to organize messages. 

Pro tip 1: A persona workshop is when stakeholders collaborate to create fictional characters that represent your target audience. Persona workshops might include diverse stakeholders from your organization, and potentially from outside of your organization. Bringing a variety of stakeholders to the table will ensure that you include all perspectives when building audience personas. 

Pro tip 2: There are many ways to learn about, document, and summarize potential audiences. Partner with human-centered designers to find the best method.

Step 3: Establishing your voice

Using a consistent voice and brand builds trust with your audience and builds your credibility. Your organization can develop a set of guidelines for voice and tone that align with your mission, value proposition, and speak to your identified audiences. Some examples of voice include technical, friendly, and formal and can vary depending on the audience. 

Voice is the mixture of word choice, point of view, rhythm, punctuation, and tone that make phrases, sentences, and paragraphs flow in a particular way. Tone, a subset of voice, is the attitude or emotion your words evoke. 

When defining your tone, consider how you want your audience to feel when they experience your messaging. Defining and developing your tone can help align designers, content strategists, and writers around your messaging.

Identifying core messages is another way to ensure a consistent voice. A core message is your organization’s main, overarching theme and includes who you are, what you do, and who you do it for. Core messages can be repeatable and describe the key points you want your audience to remember.  

By being intentional with your agency’s core messages, it will be easier for stakeholders such as agency staff to leverage messages in accordance with your brand.

Pro tip: Developing your voice, tone, and core messages can take time, but re-using design elements and messaging as much as possible can help you move toward consistency. Over time, your agency might build out a brand book or style guide to provide directives on how the organization speaks. In the meantime, AP Style provides a good starting point for a consistent voice.  

Step 4: Using channels effectively

To reach the most people, it’s helpful to leverage all of your communications channels such as newsletters, social media, blog posts and more. 

Before you jump in, you might define which channels you’ll use to support communications. This will help you plan effectively and maximize the value of each impression — or each time someone views your message. It’s also helpful to learn about each channel’s reach and audience, enabling you to tailor messaging for each channel. Keep in mind that some channels reach wide audiences while others are more intimate with small audiences. 

On average, someone needs to see a message seven times before taking action. We suggest re-purposing messaging for different channels, enabling you to work smarter and faster while magnifying your impact.

Step 5: Determining participation in the program

Cross-functional teams bring a diversity of skill sets to the table, which is why it’s useful to enlist professionals from across your organization to build out your communications program. This will also enable you to develop the program with limited resources. When communication efforts include perspectives from across your organization, your messaging will be more likely to reach diverse audiences. 

While broad participation is important for developing a successful communications program, it’s helpful to form a role or team with content and communication skills to articulate vision, provide oversight, and to enable storytelling. This might be a dedicated communications manager who provides valuable skills such as writing and editing, content strategy, marketing, and more. This team will likely oversee content and communications support in order to align the organization on goals, messages, and needs. 

Pro tip 1: If you work on a distributed, or remote team, you might use a responsibility matrix to ensure that all stakeholders understand their roles in the communications program.

Pro tip 2: In addition to creating a responsibilities matrix, you might try creating dedicated resources, such as content templates and guides, to help keep your organization aligned on messaging. 

Step 6: Preparing to scale your communications program

Integrating communications into existing feature or release planning will help prepare your program for scaling. This is something that requires collaboration from product, technical, and design teams. When planning for a new release or feature, you might develop a rollout checklist process to help teams envision the end story for your audience, and it may be helpful to work with the product team to map out long-term plans. 

Pro tip: When planning future communications, remember to account for any approvals or quality checks needed from stakeholders outside of your organization.

Step 7: Measuring your impact

In order to craft effective messages, you must understand how your messages are resonating with your audience and where information gaps exist. Measuring your program’s success will enable you to incorporate valuable user feedback into your storytelling and prevent you from spending time on messaging that misses the mark. Making use of stakeholder feedback can also empower your team to address audience needs proactively as part of your communications process. You might gather feedback from your audience through surveys, third party analytics tools, polls on social media, or another method. 

Press hits, or media hits, refer to mentions of your organization or product in media outlets via articles, blog posts, TV broadcasts, podcasts, or social media posts. Press hits can be helpful for gathering qualitative data or can be used as an impact statistic. 

For email campaigns, you can measure growth and impact through open rates, click through rates, and heatmaps. Synthesizing insights into reports can provide your leadership with a big picture understanding of how emails are performing and can focus the communications team on new opportunities and next steps. 

Pro tip: Start small and grow your analysis over time. By creating SMART objectives — a goal-setting method that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound — you can rapidly evaluate and adjust your approach. Analytics tools within GovDelivery and Google Analytics offer quick insights, surveys, and feedback tools that enable quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Conclusion 

When used effectively, communications can help your agency build trust, transparency, and credibility with the public. The key to building a successful communications program is to focus on human-centered design practices while working with diverse stakeholders to define essential and repeatable messages that align with your agency’s mission. Once you’ve established key messages and a voice, understanding your audience and how your communications impact the public enables you to scale and mature the communications program. 

Special thanks to Arin Black, former Nava employee, for contributing to the research in this article.