“Most people don’t plan to fail; they fail to plan.”
That’s what I wrote in yesterday’s post, What Is a Communications Strategy? because the sad truth is most organizations don’t have a communications strategy.
We want to better understand how well all types of organizations – businesses, nonprofits, schools and churches – do at developing a strategy for their communications and where they need the most help. So, we created the Communications Strategy Survey.
Your Survey, Your Results
I will first share the results of the survey in the breakout session I’m leading June 5 at the Biola Digital Conference.
The following week, we’ll publish more extensive analysis in a blog post here. Our hope is the insights gained will serve as a springboard to discuss how, together, we can improve our own strategic thinking and create resources to help organizations develop better communications strategies.
We want this to be a collaborative effort. So, if you want to slice and dice the raw data yourself, we’ll even make that available (excluding the email addresses of participants, of course).
Go!
Please take 2 minutes to complete Communications Strategy Survey.
Then please share this post on Facebook, Twitter, G+, email, smoke signals, maybe a tattoo.
Hey, why wait for the survey results to start the discussion. Post a comment…
- How do you feel about your organization’s communications strategy?
- What is the biggest barrier to an effective communications strategy?
- What strategic communications resources would be most helpful to you?
14 Comments
You have posted really great ideas and meaning of communication strategy. Using this process can become very helpful in accomplishing the goals.
Thanks for reading the post. In the future, please post your comments with your name rather than targeted keywords, so I know your comment is genuine and not simply a link building campaign.
Being in a large urban church with Joel Osteen literally in our backyard, we face some unique challenges and opportunities. Failing to communicate effectively really means just failing in our circumstance.
Good point Harold. I certainly see both challenges and opportunities in your situation.
My "communications strategy" (I suppose it would qualify) is quite basic. It has served the purpose I intended: to get started connecting with people who have an interest in what I have to share and to be a mutual benefit to each other. But it is really time to take it to the next level. It needs to get even more specific and consistently applied.
I look forward to your thoughts on how to do that.
For what it's worth, I did fill out the survey. 🙂
Thanks Sheila! I appreciate you completing the survey. And I agree… sounds like you're off to a good start, but you have the potential to communicate much more effectively with a more comprehensive strategy.
Thanks for this great post, Paul! I took the survey and look forward to hearing the overall results! Here are my answers to your questions above…
How do you feel about your organization’s communications strategy?
Our strategy is ever evolving. The strategy is good, the implementation is challenging with a lack of people to task to. Working on that!
What is the biggest barrier to an effective communications strategy?
The idea that communicating comes from one specific team and isn't embraced by all teams to think about how what they're doing communicates our vision. Especially in the area of social media, my plan is a paradigm shift for staff.
What strategic communications resources would be most helpful to you?
Logistical planning help. What the different roles of a communications team could/should look like. How to write roles for staff positions that would add to the plan on top of their regular job responsibilities.
Thanks Lisa! I think one of the biggest challenges churches face is the relationship between the communications team and the other teams in the church. In many churches it's "every ministry for itself." Each ministry has it's own contact lists, even it's own logo, and communicates however and whenever it likes. In other churches it's a top-down approach and everything must flow through the communications team.
Ultimately, I don't think either approach is very effective. It doesn't work well if either the communications team or other ministry teams have absolutely power over communications. They need to figure out how to work well together. The communications team needs to see their role as serving and empowering ministries rather than lording over them. And ministry teams need to see the communications team as a great resource – people with specialized skills and insight that can help the ministry reach its full potential.
I agree. I'm happy to say that we work the way the majority of the time. It's always funny to me when a ministry brings me a "flyer" they produced that looks like they pulled it from an archive from the 80s. Funny in a not so funny way. I have a team to help them with this and we are at their disposal as a resource!
I'm enjoying strolling through your archives and picking out things that are useful. Thanks for all you do for the church!
Thanks Lisa. Glad to hear you work that way most of the time. Your comment reminds me that we need to do a little more "curating" of our content. After 7+ years of blogging, we could better serve folks like you if we created some resource guides that link to the most useful content.
thank God for you host us, the ministry is doing well we have seen God here in Kenya, sometimes ministry is challenging but we have seen the grace of God take us through. we are believing God for great things this year .thank you for all that you do for the church.
That's awesome, Jonah. Where in Kenya are you? I've served in Nakuru on a couple of occasions.
shared on scoop Unable to complete atm not walking or working GR8 survey BTW
communication strategy is very important. Unfortunately, many people forget about it 🙂