Internal Communications Strategy Guide
A practical framework for internal communicators who want to solve bigger problems, make smarter choices and improve organisational performance.
How to use this guide
Seven steps to a bigger impact.
This guide takes you through seven key steps, with practical exercises to help you build your plan.
Drawn from our 60 years’ experience helping many of the world’s best-known organisations communicate with their people.
Recommendations from The Internal Comms Podcast, to give you further insight and inspiration along the way.
Start with the difference between activity and strategy.
Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth.
Many internal communication plans are not plans at all. They are editorial calendars. To-do lists. Campaign timelines. Well-intentioned promises to “raise awareness”, “drive engagement” or “improve communication”. These can be useful, but they do not constitute a strategic internal communication plan.
So, what’s the difference between a plan that’s tactical and one that’s strategic?
The goal of your plan is not to describe what your internal communication team will do. The goal is to explain how internal communication will help move your organisation forward.
Before you start planning, ask yourself:
Build a clear picture of your organisation before you start planning.
As part of their preparations for take-off, pilots complete a pre-flight checklist. Before military commanders commit troops to battle, they gather intelligence.
You need to do the same.
The best strategic decisions are based on insight, data and evidence. So, before you start writing your strategy, take stock of what you know – and what you don’t.
How confident are you in your understanding of the following?
Drag each scale to rate your confidence, 1–5. Anything below a 4 flags a possible gap — capture what you know, and what you don’t, with a note.
Now dig a little deeper.
The questions below will help you connect the dots between where the organisation is heading, what leaders and employees need – and want – from communication, and what you realistically have at your disposal.
Don’t worry if you can’t answer everything yet. Gaps are useful: they tell you where you need to dig deeper before making strategic decisions.
Organisational Priorities
Leadership Expectations
Employee Understanding
Channels, Resources & Constraints
Priorities shift. Strategies can be poorly documented. Sometimes leadership teams are still working out where the organisation is heading.
Don’t let that stop you planning.
Create an interim strategy based on what you do know:
A good-enough strategy is infinitely better than no strategy at all.
Get beyond the symptoms and uncover what really needs solving.
One of the most common mistakes in strategy development is solving the wrong problem. Or, more accurately, solving a symptom rather than a cause.
Here are some familiar symptoms – and some equally familiar solutions.
Employees complain about too many emails
The tempting solutionEmail-free Fridays!
Poor targeting, message duplication or weak channel governance
Engagement scores are low
The tempting solutionA campaign to bring your EVP to life
A poor employee experience
Leaders say people don’t understand the strategy
The tempting solutionMore strategy communication
A confusing strategy or one not written in a clear, compelling and meaningful way
Content isn’t being read
The tempting solutionBolder, more engaging content
Poorly targeted content that isn’t relevant or useful
Managers aren’t communicating effectively
The tempting solutionA manager communication toolkit
Lack of time, confidence, context or motivation
Every one of those solutions sounds perfectly reasonable. And every one of them could be completely wrong.
Before you leap to the solution, stop and ask: What’s really going on here?
The best strategies are built on insight. An insight is a deeper truth that helps explain why something is happening – and points you towards a smarter solution.
Toyota developed a deceptively simple problem-solving technique. Start with the presenting problem. Ask why? Then ask why again. Keep going until you get beyond the symptoms and closer to the underlying cause.
Now look for the deeper truth in what you’ve discovered.
And remember: communication may be only part of the answer. Sometimes the smartest recommendation an internal communicator can make is that communication alone won’t fix this.
Define what success looks like before deciding how to get there.
One of the most influential business books ever written is Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Its second habit is deceptively simple – Begin with the end in mind.
We build this step into every new AB project. Before we start any journey with a client, we decide on the destination.
Too many communication teams spend their time responding to requests, managing channels and publishing content without stopping to ask a more important question – What are we ultimately trying to achieve?
This is your opportunity to lift your eyes from today’s challenges and think bigger. Imagine it is 18 months from now. Your strategy has been a resounding success. What has changed?
What do employees know, think, feel or do differently as a result of your strategy?
What do leaders know, think, feel or do differently?
What is different about the way teams communicate, collaborate or share knowledge?
How has communication helped move the organisation forward?
Sometimes it is easier to think about what happens if nothing changes.
Focus your resources where they can make the greatest difference.
This is where many plans fall apart. They try to do everything.
Strategy requires choice. If everything is a priority, nothing is. And every time you invest more time, energy or budget in one area, something else inevitably receives less.
This can be uncomfortable – particularly for internal communication teams accustomed to saying ‘yes’ to every request. But making deliberate choices creates focus, protects your resources and gives you a much better chance of making a meaningful impact.
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.Michael Porter
Look at everything your team currently does – channels, content, campaigns, events, meetings, services and responsibilities – alongside any new activities you’re considering. Plot each against two criteria: how much difference it makes (impact) and how much time, money and resource it requires (effort).
Quick wins worth exploiting.
Strategic priorities worth the effort.
Easy to do – but is it worth doing at all?
Prime candidates to retire, automate, delegate or hand back.
Don’t overthink the scoring. The value of this exercise lies in the conversation it creates, not in achieving mathematical precision.
Turn your strategic priorities into a practical communication approach.
Now that you’ve made some smart strategic choices, it’s time to turn those priorities into a communication plan.
The temptation is to jump straight to activity: We need a campaign. Let’s do a town hall. We should send an email. Resist it.
Start with the change you are trying to create. Then identify the people who matter most. Only then decide what communication experiences, content and channels will help you get there.
Message before method.
A good communication objective isn’t something you do. It’s something you want to change.
Where possible, make your objective specific and measurable.
Instead of: “Raise awareness of the new strategy”, try: “Increase the proportion of employees who understand the three strategic priorities and can explain how their role contributes to them.”
The UK Government Communication Service’s OASIS framework provides a useful discipline for communication planning. You don’t need a lengthy plan for every piece of communication – but these five questions provide an excellent sense-check before significant activity begins.
Not every audience is equally important. Ask: Whose behaviour, understanding or support is most critical to achieving our objective? Avoid defaulting to “all employees”.
Think about meaningful differences in role, location, seniority, access to technology, working environment, attitudes, needs and influence. And don’t forget the people who influence your priority audiences – sometimes the most important audience isn’t the person whose behaviour needs to change, but the leader, manager or colleague they trust.
Map your priority audiences
Communication cannot solve every problem. A lack of skills, resources, time, trust or leadership action may require something more than communication. Spotting that is part of being a strategic adviser.
Only now should you start thinking about execution. Don’t begin with “What will we publish?” Instead, ask: “What experience do we want to create?” A strong ecosystem gives people different ways to hear, discuss, participate, find, experience and respond.
Most important communication challenges will need more than one.
Now choose the channels that can deliver those experiences. A healthy channel ecosystem usually needs a balance of three types:
Helping people hear and understand.
Enabling conversation, participation and feedback.
Helping people find what they need, when they need it.
For each channel, ask:
For any one communication challenge, less is usually more. A small number of well-chosen channels working together will usually outperform a scattergun of disconnected activity.
Can you complete this sentence?
We want to move from to by creating , using , and we’ll know it’s working when .
The final sense-check – if you can complete this sentence, you have the foundations of a communication plan. It stays private on your device.
Mobilise your network, build your roadmap, measure what matters and adapt as you go.
A strategy only becomes valuable when something changes as a result. And you won’t make that change happen alone.
Time and again on The Internal Comms Podcast, we’ve heard the same advice from experienced communicators: build great relationships across the business.
You need senior sponsors who will back your ambition. Leaders and managers who will bring it to life. Champions who will create momentum. Colleagues in HR, Marketing, IT, Employee Experience and elsewhere who can contribute their expertise and open doors.
Your network isn’t peripheral to your strategy. It’s key to making it happen.
Go back to the objectives you set in Step 6. For each one, decide what evidence will tell you whether communication is making a difference. Think at three levels:
Did people receive, attend, watch, read, click, participate or respond?
Did anything change in what people know, think, feel or do?
Is there evidence that communication contributed to a wider business outcome?
Don’t confuse what’s easy to measure with what’s important to measure. Open rates can be useful. But an email being opened tells you very little about whether anything changed as a result.
Your strategy isn’t set in stone. Wherever possible, pilot new ideas before rolling them out widely. Keep what works and change what doesn’t.
And finally…
Your strategy is itself a piece of communication. Don’t bury it in a 47-page PowerPoint.
Bring it to life. Demonstrate your communication skills. Perhaps your strategy could be a visual roadmap, a short video or an A-to-Z guide.
Demonstrate the very standards of communication you’re asking others to embrace. Because if the medium is the message, your strategy should be your first proof point.
Want a helping hand?
You don’t have to do this alone.
For more than 60 years, AB has helped organisations understand what’s really going on inside their business – and build internal communication strategies that make a measurable difference.
Through our Acid Test communication audit, research and employee listening, we’ll help you uncover what’s really going on – not just what appears on the surface.
We’ll turn organisational priorities and audience insight into a focused, practical internal communication strategy – with clear objectives, choices and measures of success.
We’ll transform the thinking into compelling narratives, campaigns, content and communication experiences that get noticed – and make a difference.
Whether you need a fresh pair of eyes, an expert sounding board or a partner for the whole journey, we’d love to help. Arrange a virtual coffee with our Managing Director, Katie Macaulay, and our Client Services Director, Abi Terry.
Let’s make a bigger impact.