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Overworked With No Time to Write

March 31, 2010

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At the Hype Lab we have been feeling the squeeze of too much time spent working and not enough time engaging with our potential customers. It is one of the challenges of owning your own business: when you are the sole person responsible for taking care of the clients' requests, and those requests increase, the last thing you want to do is spend valuable time writing blog stories, tweeting and conversing on Facebook.

So what can you do to keep on top of the communications? The best strategy is to develop a communications plan. Is the work involved with developing a plan worth it? Absolutely, because a written communication plan will:

  • Give your day-to-day work a focus
  • Help you to set priorities
  • Provide you with a sense of order and control
  • Help get the rest of the staff (if there is any) to support your program
  • Protect you against last-minute, seat-of-the-pants demands
  • Prevent you from feeling overwhelmed, and instead offer peace of mind.

Here are some tips I quickly found online when I googled "communication plan." The best time to develop the plan is when you're doing your annual budgeting and business plan. But if you're just starting out with thinking about communications, then do it when you have a few hours of down-time. Believe me, it's well worth it, even if it means staying up late a few days a week to get it done!

So what is it? A communication plan is a written document that describes:

  • What you want to accomplish with your business communications (your objectives)
  • Ways in which those objectives can be accomplished (your goals)
  • To whom your communications will be addressed (your audience)
  • How you will accomplish your objectives (the tools and time table)
  • How you will measure the results (evaluation)

Communications include all written, spoken and electronic interaction with your audience such as publications, online content, customer resource and marketing materials, internal procedure documentation, speeches, and blog and news articles.

To develop the plan, first do a needs assessment. Evaluate your current communications and how effective each activity or piece of communication is. If you have time, survey clients or host focus groups and communicate with your staff. Then go through each of the bullets listed above that describe what the plan is and fill in the blanks. Plan on three to four days to develop this plan. Once in place, the plan will smooth your job all year long and bring a semblance of order and consistency to your communication efforts.

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