Developing your strategic plan is a team effort. We'll review your organization's goals and your current communication plans. We'll interview your communication staff and your executives. We'll review all existing research about your current communications. If necessary, we'll suggest additional research to make sure that we have a realistic understanding of what is and is not working for you now.

Then we'll document our assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your communication plan, and the opportunities and threats presented by your organization's plan, your industry and your marketplace. This becomes the basis of an off-site session where we facilitate a focused brainstorming to take your communications from where they are now to become the new foundation for a strategy that is more focused on business results.

Your plan will address:

• Better meeting the needs of your communication stakeholders.
• Developing campaigns on integrated messages using the best combinations of channels.
• Remixing the channels available to your audiences to provide the best combination of access, credibility and effectiveness at the lowest cost.
• Providing the right infrastructure of staffing, budget and other resources to support the rest of the strategy.

• We focus strategies on operational outcomes and the audience behaviors it will take to achieve them.
• We base strategies on research, not just gut perceptions.
• Strategies we develop include measures of success.

Reconstruction strategy: A Fortune 100 company had eliminated nearly all internal communications during a major downsizing. Two years later, senior leadership realized they needed to rebuild the function to help them drive a re-energized growth strategy throughout their global workforce. We conducted executive interviews and on-site benchmarking visits with other global companies, which provided a strong research basis to the strategic plan we developed during 2-1/2 days of brainstorming. Each element of the plan included measures of success to track the plan's implementation.

Strategy deconstruction: A global health care company's annual strategic planning process typically resulted in pages and pages of strategies developed along product lines and communication department functions. This often resulted in disconnected messages being sent to some of the same audiences from different communication staffers. When the client asked for help in making the plan more measurable, we began by deconstructing the plan into a giant grid that outlined each of the messages and tactics for each family of stakeholders. Then we were able to flesh out the plan and develop measures that involved researching each audience only a once a year on all the messages and tactics intended for it.