2. Getting Started: Audit

Auditing your current communications

An internal audit helps you take stock of the recurring and ad hoc communications that reach your most important audiences, consider their impact and effectiveness, and identify opportunities to cut, combine, or create updates that may serve your readers even better.

To help you along the way, we've built a few exercises that can guide your thinking

First, revisit each of the three key audiences you identified in the “Reflect” exercise. Spend some time thinking about the recurring or ad hoc communications that each audience receives each week or month. A few things to consider while you work through it:

• The types could be varied — all-staff, department, client, ad-hoc, etc.
• The frequency may vary — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.
• The sender might not be you — HR updates, board updates, etc. 

Do your best to capture everything, and you can download an interactive version of this exercise to refer back to as often as you need.

Rank your communications for each of your 3 audiences on the following scale, using the chart below as your guide. 

• Irrelevant to this audience [0 - Importance score]
• Inspirational, non-essential [1 - Importance score]
• Important, but not timely [2 - Importance score]
• Essential upon arrival [3 - Importance score]

For now, let’s focus on the comms that earned a Level 2 or a Level 3 in level of importance. Those are what we’ll consider “essential” and what will be the highest value communications you can offer your audiences with your HQ update. (Remember: Essential + Interesting + Brief + Conversational = The winning mix to win the war for attention.)

Within each audience, can any of the Level 2 or Level 3 communications be combined or consolidated into one or a few recurring communications? Imagine what it would look like to send each audience the fewest number — but highest value — communications possible. The table below can help define what they would include, who would participate in creating them, and how often you’d send each.

It’s possible that there are still gaps between what your ideal messages are and what each of your audiences need to be as efficient and productive in their day-to-day work as possible. That’s OK! It’s why we created these exercises.

For six minutes, free write. What perspectives (executives, leaders, managers, etc), insights (sales figures, marketing insights, product releases, etc.), services (news roundups, media mentions, competitive intel, etc.) would help each audience do their job even better if they had regular access to them? Essential communications are often actionable, timely, consequential, and insightful.