With or without a formal communication strategy, every organisation communicates with its audience in one way or the other. However, to ensure effective relationship with key stakeholders, every corporate organization requires a dynamic plan that allows it to strategically relate with its customers as well as other key internal and external publics.
As observed by Columbia University’s Centre of Continuing Education in an introduction to its Master of Science in Strategic Communications programme, a good communication plan identifies how an organisation or enterprise can move from where it finds itself to where it desires to be in the future.
Why Evaluate Existing Corporate Communications
As noted by Columbia University’s Centre of Continuing Education, a good communication strategy is a map that connects the present state of an organisation to a future desired state. In order to design a good customer relations plan, it is important to evaluate how an organisation has been dealing with its customers in the past and whether such communication approaches have had good impacts on the organisation or not.
In a publication titled “Designing a Communications Strategy” by the International Research Center of Canada (IDRC) under its Research Matters programme and contained on its website, it is emphasised that reviewing a company’s past and present ways of dealing with its publics is an essential first step in designing a good corporate communications strategy.
A thorough assessment of an existing customer relations plan ensures that its (the plan's) strengths are identified and incorporated in a new plan while avoiding a repeat of its weaknesses in new strategies.
According to the IDRC publication, a review of old strategies answers important questions like “How have we been communicating in the past? How effective has that been? How do our audiences perceive us?” Answers to these questions provide useful insights as to how a new plan should be designed and what elements, channels and key messages should be incorporated.
Focus Areas in Evaluating Corporate Communications
As recommended by the IDRC, the evaluation of existing communication approaches has to focus of generating the relevant information that will inform the design of a new strategy. The evaluation should thus focus on themes such as the following:
- The general state of communications in the organization;
- The ways by which the organization has been communicating with its customers and other external publics in the past;
- How the organisation has been communicating internally; and
- How audiences perceive the organization
Audience Survey for Evaluating Existing Communication Approaches
An audience survey is considered one of the best ways by which an organisation can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of its existing and past communication approaches. To do such a survey, it is important to consider who should constitute survey participants, channels for distributing survey questions and how to receive completed questionnaires.
As much as possible, customers and other stakeholders who have been dealing with an organisation should be used as survey participants in order to generate responses that will fairly represent how an organisation’s previous communication approaches have fared.
In an article titled “Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Building a Business Case” written by Richard Snow and published by online customer relations firm, Search CRM.com, he noted that Web-based surveys have the advantage that once they are set up, there are far fewer manual resources involved. Using online surveys for evaluating exiting strategies also guarantees survey participants some level of confidentiality, which in turn encourages truthful responses.
Readers may also enjoy: Tips on How to Write Communication Strategies.
