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Continuity planning: Communication scheduling

by David Blakey

The plans for communication need a schedule that will ensure that the messages reach the right people at the right time.

[Monday 29 August 2016]

With a communication plan in place, you will need to monitor how the plan is working and whether it needs to be adjusted or perhaps replaced with another plan.

If you develop your communication plan in a short time, because there are pressing threats, you may decide to leave this additional work until your plan has been implemented. You can add these additional documents when you have time.

Communication schedule

You should bring all your tactical plans together and build the schedule from them.

Each tactical plan will have the following parts:

• start and end dates for each message;
• the objective;
• the message;
• the external audience;
• the internal audience (optional); and
• the actions to be performed and the resources needed to perform them.

You should take the media and dates for each plan and place them into a schedule. If you need precise planning, this should be set up as a chart with a row for each week. If you can be more relaxed, you may be able to use monthly. I suggest beginning with a weekly chart and then changing it to monthly if that will work better for you. Often, you will find that monitoring and reporting is difficult to do on a weekly basis, and this would be a good reason to switch to monthly.

The content of the chart will be:

1. the start day of the week, such as 29 Aug 2016, if you know it;
2. the completion date, if known;
3. the tactical plan;
4. the person in charge of that plan, such as DB;
5. the message to be conveyed in that week, for which you should use a single sentence, such as Tell customers that supplies will not be interrupted;
6. the external audience, such as retailers, local authorities; and
7. any internal audience, such as manufacturing, transport.

All of these you will be able to get from the tactical plans.

We shall add some more content:

8. what is happening in that week, such as announcement on website, post on Facebook; and
9. the resources you need to achieve those actions, such as webmaster, social media team.

It is better not to use a columnar format for the schedule, so that you do not feel the need to abbreviate or use codes.

Schedule dates

Here are some dates that you should consider in your schedule. You can include them in the actions section of the schedule.

Public holidays

Consider whether public holidays, religious days or anniversaries will affect your schedule, and whether that effect will be positive or negative.

You may decide that some messages will work better if they are delivered during a holiday.

Alternatively, you may decide that some messages need a period that is not interrupted by holidays.

Review dates

For every message in your schedule, you need a review date. This will be when you review the effect of your message and decide what action to take next. It is easier if the person in charge of delivering the message does the review as well. Although in consulting we usually prefer to have actions reviewed by a peer, the nature of a communication plan in a continuity plan and the time pressures may not permit you that luxury.

Other dates

You should include the dates of events, such as meetings with internal or external audiences. You should also put in dates for reminders, giving you and your team notice of future events and actions. You should add dates when you are going to meet with partners and other supporters.

[This article was revised on 20 September 2020.]

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

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