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.
Communication Plan Template - [10 Steps to Build Your Own]
What Is a Project Management Communication Plan?
A communication plan is a document through which you can deliver timely information to stakeholders in many situations. Stakeholders may be:
- Investors;
- Employees;
- Customers;
- Media outlets;
- Local government officials.
For instance, you can deliver a crisis communication plan when stakeholders need to know the steps your organization must follow to face the crisis.
A good communication strategy manifested through a communication plan should prepare key stakeholders for a given situation by providing the knowledge and tools necessary to understand the problem.
What Should a Good Communication Plan Contain?
Even though communication plans can vary regarding the information they contain, generally, they all integrate the following pieces of information:
- Business goals;
- Communication objectives;
- Tactics;
- Prioritizing the stakeholders;
- Timeline.
Which Are the Advantages of Building a Communication Plan?
A proper communication plan that promotes an excellent communications strategy offers multiple benefits for your business. Among these:
- It enhances client and stakeholder management;
- It defines the guidelines for the communication process.
A communication plan may be beneficial in identifying the following:
- What key message do you need to share with the stakeholders;
- How you should communicate this message, through which media channels;
- Who are the stakeholders, the intended audience, and the direct recipient of the project’s success;
- If there exist different audience segments for the project plan and which communication channels you should use.
Using communication plans also creates a positive image of your brand. It ensures that every message you deliver through different communication channels is correct, straightforward, and consistent.
Besides, a communication plan that covers many communication mediums, such as social media or email marketing, will help you to handle crises more effectively.
In general, big companies regularly perform team meetings to be ready to go in case of a crisis or when a situational analysis is worrying.
Finally, building an effective communication plan and planning for a crisis is a good practice since it will allow you to evaluate potential risks and better manage public opinion.
How to Build your own Project Communication Plan
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.
Project Communication Plan Examples
Now, we're giving you examples of project communication plans. Both models include specific communication objectives, an analysis of the stakeholders, and your plan's procedures.
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.
Tips and Tricks to Write a Compelling Communication Plan
- When you use a communications plan template describing how to handle a crisis, explain the relevant information of the situation and to whom it affects.
- If the communication plan involves many stakeholders, it's better to divide that audience into several categories. This way, you can focus your communication efforts and use a unique communication channel for each.
- Your business objectives must be clear and straightforwardly provide information. The communication style should be simple and give data to all the stakeholders involved in the decision.
Project Communication Plan Templates
In this section, we’re giving you three different types of communication plans templates that you can use to promote your ideas within your business.
Communication Plan Grid Template
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.
An Extended Project Communication Plan Template
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.
Annual Marketing Communications Plan Template
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.
Project Communication Plan
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.
Internal Communication Plan Template
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.
Nonprofit Project Communication Plan Template
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.
Which Software Is Better to Build a Communication Plan
Most Communication Plan Templates you can find on the web are Excel files you can easily edit and fill out. Still, you can find some in Word and PowerPoint formats. Whatever the case, the first step is to get the Microsoft Office suite from a reliable website.
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.
Bottom Line
Managing, messaging, and communicating the ideas behind a project is crucial to create a successful enterprise in the modern world. There are a lot of channels and media to promote our message. Even having an omnichannel strategy for these purposes is a path you should consider. Still, all this is fruitless if you do not perform a good communication plan to extend your ideas to your organization's teams.
We hope we've helped you know who needs to be communicated with and when, and what is the best way. Still, if you're interested in reading other crucial articles for businesses and organizations, browse our blog. Here you’ll find various pieces of relevant information as well as multiple templates for reports, documents, and more!