Consulting Journal: Continuity planning

Continuity planning: Communication planning

by David Blakey

All continuity plans need a communication plan.

[Monday 22 August 2016]

Communication planning is always needed for a business continuity plan. Any organization that is facing a serious threat to its business continuing needs to make sure that it communicates the right messages to the right people in the right way and at the right times. It is not an acceptable communication plan that the organization decides to wing it, that is, to invent a comminication plan when there is already an active threat.

Communication plans are developed by building the following documents.

Communication strategy

The overall strategy must define:

the objectives of the plan for the organization - what the team hope can be achieved by the communication strategy and plans;
the messages that support these objectives;
the means by which the messages can be delivered;
the timing of message delivery; and
the audience for the messages.

Communication operational plans

Each operational plan is aimed at one of the objectives in the strategy document.

The elements of an operational plan are:

the main objective that the plan is intended to achieve;
the person in charge of the plan;
one or more individual low-level objectives for the plan, most of which should be aligned with the main objective, although there may be other objectives that the plan can achieve outside the main objective;
the external audience, including their own aims, the benefits to them from the plan, and what the plan will do for them;
the internal audience (often identified as 'stakeholders'), if there is one, with the same details as for the external audience;
the messages that will be conveyed to those audiences, including keywords that will influence them positively, how their thinking will be changed by each message, and how each message targets its audience's needs, opportunities, threats and constraints; and
other partners who can help us to deliver the messages or endorse them.

Communication tactical plan

Each operational plan should have an initial tactical plan. No tactical plan (or indeed operational plan) is permanent. They are all subject to change as a result of feedback and changed circumstances.

A tactical plan contains:

the objective, which is one of the low-level objectives from the operational plan, or the main objective if that fits;;
the external audience, which may be a subset of the external audience in the operational plan;
the internal audience, if there is one;
the message or messages to be conveyed, described in more detail than in the operational plan;
the methods or media for delivering each message;
start and end dates for each message, based on the methods and media, including whether there are dependencies between messages and whether some messages should be repeated using the same or different methods;
an outline of how results will be measured, which will be used to prepare other documents.

Conclusion

With these documents prepared, you can start to implement your communication plan immediately. There are some other decisions to be made and some other documents to prepare. If time is pressing, these documents will help you to make a start on getting your messages out.

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