The ‘key three’: message, audience, budget
In any communications endeavour, the first steps are figuring out what you want to say, who needs to receive the message and how much money you can spend in the process. Avoid the temptation to hurriedly ‘throw something together’ when the need to get a message across emerges. Working through these steps will help you clarify your purpose and will result in a more useful end product.
Clarify the message
What do you want to say? What are you trying to accomplish? Determining precisely what you want to say is a crucial first step. It sounds obvious, but people often fail to clarify the main point, leading to messages that are muddy or vague. It is helpful to write down the key message(s) or tell it to a colleague. If you cannot explain it simply, you probably have not clarified it sufficiently. Some people use the ‘elevator message’ technique: The key message should be succinct enough that you can explain it to someone on an elevator ride.
Identify the target audience
IFAD has an enormous range of potential audiences, from poor rural participants in our projects to heads of state. Communications are effective only if they reach the appropriate audience. Ask yourself who is the person who can make use of or act on your message. Within any one issue, different messages are appropriate for different audiences. Initiating a project that aims to encourage women’s groups to open bank savings accounts would call for quite different messages for different audiences. For example:
- For potential participants in the savings groups: Joining the savings group will help you save enough money to send your children to school. For the bank manager: Helping our savings group open accounts will add to your deposits and develop long-term customer loyalty, while demonstrating the bank’s commitment to the community.
- For a potential donor: A similar project resulted in women saving an average of xx per month, and rates of secondary school enrolment among their daughters were xx per cent higher than among daughters of women who did not participate. With your contribution, we can extend this success to more communities.
Once you have pinpointed the appropriate audience, the next step is choosing the appropriate media. Sometimes it is obvious – for instance, yearly financial results are always reported in the Annual Report. For a major new partnership, a short press release is appropriate. To report a major project success at an international meeting, a speech and a simple brochure might be called for. Using the variety of media available, and especially by exploiting social media, our messages can reach and influence countless people in more diverse audiences than ever before.
Prepare a budget
Your communications budget will help determine the means. Production costs add up quickly. Knowing your audience and message will help in determining how sophisticated a product you need. You will want to develop a precise budget that accounts for each step of the process – writing, editing, design, proofreading, printing and distribution (for a print product). Be as accurate as possible in estimating how many copies you will need, but avoid undercounting: It is a lot more expensive to print 3,000 copies twice than to print 6,000 copies once.
Be sure to include a ‘distribution plan’ in the budget – shipping materials can be another costly line item. The most expensive product is the one left gathering dust on a shelf because there was no plan or budget for getting it to the intended audience. The distribution plan should also identify the audience for hard copy versus electronic distribution – you may find that an electronic publication will suffice for your audience, saving funds for another communications activity.
Be sure to include a ‘distribution plan’ in the budget – shipping materials can be another costly line item. The most expensive product is the one left gathering dust on a shelf because there was no plan or budget for getting it to the intended audience. The distribution plan should also identify the audience for hard copy versus electronic distribution – you may find that an electronic publication will suffice for your audience, saving funds for another communications activity.