How to write a comms strategy in ten easy steps

Charity communications teams are often over-stretched and under-resourced. And many smaller charities have only one person to handle all communications and marketing – from managing social media accounts to producing annual reports and promoting fundraising events.  

Carving out the time to create a comms strategy is a good investment. It will give you an overarching guide that distils what you’re aiming to do, who your audiences are, how you communicate with them, and how you’ll know you’re doing a good job. This can help you to plan your work more efficiently, knowing that the small steps you take are feeding into your charity’s broader success. 

 
Below, we break the process of creating a comms strategy into ten practical steps to help charities shape the way they communicate with a variety of audiences. 

Ten steps to develop your communications strategy 

1. Involve your team (if you have one) 

If you have a comms team (no matter how small!) it can be helpful to work through these steps together, so you develop the strategy as a team. A collaborative approach will help to bring ideas from different perspectives, keep everyone engaged, and develop a shared understanding of the strategy right from the start.  

2. Take a step back 

To start, zoom right out, and look at your charity’s mission statement. Take time to think about how your communications can support it and briefly explain this in a couple of sentences. It needn’t be overly complicated – just a simple statement of your team’s purpose and mission. Doing this will give you an anchor point if you’re feeling overwhelmed, and a way of ensuring that your comms work aligns closely with your charity’s overarching mission.  

3. Figure out your key objectives  

Next describe the main goals and objectives of your strategy. Make sure these are high level – maybe three to five goals – and cover the main areas of your work. That might include raising awareness of your charity, recruiting more volunteers, or increasing sign-ups to fundraising events.  

At this stage, you might also want to expand on these objectives to make them into SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).  

4. Define your target audience  

 
Next pin down who you want to communicate with. Try and break this into a few specific groups, for example, supporters, service users, policymakers, and volunteers. Gather existing data you have on your audiences, including any information you already have on their communication preferences and what channels and approaches they’ve responded to well in the past.  
 

5. Clarify your key messages  

It’s likely that there’s a lot you want to say to your audiences. But boiling this down to a shortlist of three or four statements will help to make your messaging consistent across all your communications. For example, if you’re emailing supporters about a fundraising event, while you’ll want to include specific information about the event, you can also include core messaging relating to your overall mission. Focus on what you want your audience to think, feel, and do after seeing your charity’s comms.   

6. Outline how you will communicate with your audiences 

Identify the main channels you want to use to communicate with each of those audiences (it’s likely they’ll differ slightly for each segment). Those channels might include email, press releases, physical flyers, social media channels). To do this, you might want to write a detailed list to start with and then hone it down to the essentials.  

7. Identify success measures  

How will you know if your strategy has been successful? Work out how you will measure its success, for example, by setting some specific milestones. You might also want to review the process of writing your strategy and note any learning points for the next time you revisit it. 

8. Use your strategy 

Your strategy is a starting point. Rather than letting it gather dust, share it with the relevant people, and use it to prioritise work, back up your decisions, and plan efficiently.  

9. Explore your strategy in greater depth 

You might want to develop your strategy in greater depth. That could include drilling down into objectives to make sure they’re SMART, building out your audiences to include marketing personas, reviewing risks, or including detail on your tone of voice and the way you communicate with audiences.  

10. Use it to create a communications plan 

You can also use it to form the basis of your detailed communications plan. The plan will include all the ways you will reach your objectives over the next 12-18 months, and include a content calendar outlining upcoming campaigns, events, and key dates.