Some essential components and rules are mandatory to maintain effective communication between your organization, clients, or employees. In this regard, communication plans give some guidelines to improve the relationship between different departments of the organization and the sales process. In this article, we're giving you a Communication Plan Template (actually, 3 of them) you can edit and fill out to facilitate the creation of this document.

Achieving an excellent communication plan involves following ten identified steps. Now we're giving these steps to communication planning:

1. Perform an Audit of your Communications Materials  

Before creating a communication plan, you must identify problems or gaps in your organization's communications climate.

To identify these problems, you can send surveys or perform hosting focus groups. Of course, you'll want to have the goals of your plan in mind before conducting the audit.  

2. Set Communication SMART Goals for your Communications Plan 

First, your goals should be SMART, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based. 

With the information you get from your audit, you can now lay out a few goals. Of course, these communication goals will depend on the project stakeholders to whom the plan is addressed. 

For example, if you're writing communications plan goals for your clients, you can write something like, "Our organization will increase the interactions with our clients by 15 %."

3. Identify the Project Deliverables and the Target Audience to Whom You'll Deliver your Plan 

It will help if you know who your target audience or listener is. Are you writing for investors? For customers? 

Your communication methods and key messages will depend on the target stakeholder you're addressing. For example, you might create an up-to-date internal document if you talk to your employees.    

4. Keep your Audiences in Mind to Outline and Write your Plan 

Now that you clearly understand your target audience, you can quickly identify the message you need to deliver to your interested ones. It's time to create your general outline and build your communication plan. The following is the structure you should follow:

• Purpose;
• Escalation framework;
• Responsibilities;
• Do’s and Don’ts;
• Strategies to maintain a response plan.    

5. Determine the Best Channel(s) to Communicate your Company’s News

The communication method you use to deliver the communication plan varies depending on the audience you're addressing. A company email could be a good alternative if you need to provide the message to internal stakeholders. In-person meetings are also a great alternative.

Regarding customers, your organization has multiple options to promote an effective communications plan. Some effective channels are the following:

• Content marketing;
• Email marketing;
• Search Online Optimization;
• Influencer marketing;
• Affiliate marketing.  

6. Decide Which Team Members Are In Charge of Delivering the Message

The team member delivering the message must be related to the field of action or stakeholders. They must have a good knowledge of the area in question. 

For instance, if your HR department is running a new project, you can ask the project manager to deliver the first approach to the team. Then, the manager should perform training sessions to ensure understanding.

Assigning a vital project team member benefits internal and external participants. Among these:

• Team members know where they must go if they need resources to complete specific goals, needs, or necessary information.
• Team members meet their responsibilities, being capable of creating a new initiative or action plan regarding their specific tasks.

7. Estimate a Timeline for the Entire Project and Specific Tasks

It would help if you considered how long each step and the entire project would take. It's also clever to infer how long a cycle will last. Project communication plans always estimate the process of implementing a stakeholder communication plan.

This implementation is essential as your organization can identify profitable intervals during the year and deliver communication plans for those key dates. This way, you can improve the communication type with stakeholders, either member of your team or customers. 

Besides, with clear deadlines on the horizon, your organization can choose preferences, work in detail, and establish goals against your direct competitors. With a better understanding of the periods of your project, you can lead your organization in one direction.        

8. Create Key Messages According to the Stakeholder Information

To create a clear communication plan, you need to craft internal and external messages that fit the needs of stakeholders. The idea is to customize the notifications when communicating with the specific interested ones. Some you should ask yourself are the following questions:

• What does the audience know about your organization and the context of the project?
• What type of language would the stakeholders prefer?
• What is the critical project information you should highlight?
• What other information is crucial when you communicate with the stakeholders?

Organize your audience in different sections or groups and create unique messages and documents for each. Simply choose and add those you need into your communication plan.

9. Outline the Communication Methods and Campaigns

To maintain the main activities of your plan, you should respect the three following steps:

• Align your plan with your calendar. We talked about the dates above. Now it's time to look at the calendar and create a customer communication strategy to enhance the planned initiatives.   
• Build communication campaigns. These campaigns will help you organize and track your plan's progress. You'll have to plan strategic activities to achieve your objectives and set precise dates for the end of the campaign.
• Plan activities to achieve your objectives. The activities should be aligned with the goals of your communication plan. In this regard, your tactics should identify where to share the messages and how you will communicate them.

10.Measure the Results After Presenting it to Stakeholders, and Determine Successes and Areas for Improvement 

After presenting the strategic communication plan, measuring the results is mandatory to determine the success and areas that need improvement.    

As we mentioned in the second bullet point of this section, "Our organization will increase the interactions with our client by 15 %." Then it's time to measure the results. If your company still needs to set this goal, your employees might rework the objectives to offer more time to complete the goals.  

Other alternatives to improve the results planned in the internal communication plan are using a different approach or words to avoid stress or fear and choosing aspects that show what your organization needs.

The first project communication plan example is straightforward. This sample communication plan shows how to put this basic information into the project communications plans.

Source: Visme 

The second communication plan example is flashy and contains all the communication strategies. As you can see in the image above, this example only includes some of the info on the same page. It uses several pages to divide the data, such as goals and the communication strategy.

The first project communication plan template is a spreadsheet page where you can easily insert and track data. This template is excellent for developing project and communication ideas in a single document and a specific period. 

This free template considers multiple audiences and project updates for the entire project or activity. This practice is great for collaborating with different interested parties.

You can download this communication plan grid template from Smartsheet.

This template is organized into several headers. Each of these headers describes and explains a part of the communication plan in a different form. In the introduction, this template addresses the background, and SWOT analysis to then tell the objectives, the stakeholders, and the proper channels you'll use.  

You can download this template for your grand projects from Templatelab.

This template is very similar to the first one. The main difference is that the annual marketing template considers long-term objectives. Thanks to this template, your organization can plan marketing communications monthly and annually. Besides, you can divide activities for various channels and build a prepared timeline for your marketing communication strategy.  

You can download this annual marketing communication plan template from Smartsheet.

This template is extremely helpful for describing main activities of a product launch. This template fulfills all the requirements that a competent communication plan needs, i.e. general objectives, list of stakeholders, a schedule/plan, methods, timeline and communication rules.

Each essential part is separated, and the document has several pages. This way, you can better define goals and the designed team members and describe a general plan for the entire project.   

You can download this template and adjust it to your purposes from  Templatelab.

This template provides an overview of the general project by describing marketing materials, stakeholders, key activities, final communication goals, key messages, channels, and target personas. 

This template is straightforward since you can elaborate and describe each phase in detail. If you need to learn how to fill out these sections, we recommend finding a content writer. They may help you to describe each section. They can even receive your feedback and improve the most important project information. 

You can download this descriptive template from Staffbase.

As its name indicates, this template is designed for nonprofits. It is a PowerPoint template that includes two slides: the first describes all the team members and who is responsible for each task. The second slide is an annual schedule where you can mark if functions correspond to the periods. This way, you can control whether responsibilities have been delegated and accomplished on time. And, as you can infer, you will need PowerPoint to edit this board. But do not worry; in the next section, you can check an alternative to get Microsoft Office 2021.

You can get these two slides' project communication plan templates from Smartsheet.

You can go to the Microsoft official website, the Microsoft Store, and get Office Home & Student 2021 at USD$149. We know it can be expensive, so we've prepared Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global at €11,05.

Thanks to this CD Key, you can get all the latest versions of classic applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to edit the templates we’ve given above.