Corporate Communications is any communication your organisation puts out to clients, customers, employees, suppliers or the world in general - sounds obvious doesn’t it… but do you know if you've said the right thing, if its been heard, on time and by the right people?
Ask yourself some questions, are you communicating:
Your marketing communications should support your Business Objectives.
Do you know who your stakeholders, or audiences, are and do you monitor how they feel at any point in your organisation's, product or service lifecycle?
Your Comms Strategy and Plan is your marketing communications roadmap, it tells you were you are going and what you hope to achieve and whether you need a website or a leaflet or an event, when you need them and what they should say.
So now you have your Communications Strategy, your Stakeholder Engagement Plan and your Comms Plans, so it's easy all you need to do now is Implement the Communications you’ve planned.
So what types of communications is your organisation likely to need to carry out:
Strategic and operational calls to action which are heard and understood by your staff may be your prime objective, but do you listen to and understand your staff? Are their views heard and respected in return?
Carcanet Media can advise and deliver on the best 180 and 360 degree communications for your organisation.
In the current economic climate these are becoming more and more important and the possibility of redundancies hits organisations.
Employee communications can sometimes be very difficult, particularly if the message is unpalatable.
Carcanet Media is experienced in working with HR to deliver these messages in a sympathetic and compassionate way, including employee consultation around redundancy.
Change can be difficult to implement across a business, particularly if employees are used to working in a particular way for a long period of time.
It is much easier to implement change if staff are on side and want to work with management.
Carcanet Media is experienced in Change Management communications with phased transformation comms, carried out from an early stage so that there is both understanding of change and buy in from stakeholders.
Major IT projects require communications both internal and external to the project, using plain English and less techno speak,so that the end user can understand what is being delivered.
Carcanet Media is experienced in working with project teams to ensure stakeholders are informed with what is happening inside the project and the customer knows how and when the IT project will affect them.
A crisis is called a crisis because it happens when we least expect it. However, whilst we may not be able to predict what will happen when, organisation can plan ahead so that if something untoward happens, everyone knows what to do, who to contact, what to say and communications are managed so no-one says the wrong thing making the situation unnecessarily worse.
Carcanet Media has experience of both proactive planning to limit the fallout when crisis happens and reactive communications post crisis.
Good knowledge management ensures that you know what knowledge you hold within your organisation, can access it quickly and easily and that your staff know it exists, where to find it and how to use it effectively and increased security.
This helps cut down on the amount of paper your organisation handles and stores, reducing lost documents, manual paper handling and processing errors, time spent riffling through paperwork trying to find the appropriate documents, improved tracking and audit trails - all of which saves you time and money.
A centralised system means that staff do not keep information on their personal drives which may not be backed up and if stolen, lost or broken cannot be replaced without another piece of work being carried out - with associated costs.
Good knowledge management also cuts down on email traffic as large files no longer need to be sent clogging up both the system and personal mail boxes.
All this saves your organisation time and therefore money and that you don't reinvent the wheel by recommissioning work that has disappeared into a knowledge black hole...
It isn't enough though, just to implement a document repository without guidelines and policing, otherwise the analogy of standing at a cupboard and throwing things into it rather than placing them on the labelled shelves occurs and you are actually no better off!
Carcanet Media can help you organise your information and join it up with your intranet, extranets, internet and your customer relationship management databases, so that your organisation becomes more efficient, adding value and cutting costs.
Do you know your audience - are they internal or external to your organisation, or both?
Carcanet Media can analysis your stakeholders and we can advise how best to communicate with each group.
Your corporate communications strategy should fit with your business strategy and objectives. In order to plan your marketing communications strategy we will need to be able to identify the following:
This will then allow us to then plan the following strategies:
There's no point in doing lots of communicating if your audience has not heard and understood your message. Soliciting feedback from your audience on their understanding of the message is crucial, as is the flexibility to modify follow up communications in line with this feedback.
Carcanet Media use various research methodology to measure whether your audience has heard and understood the messages, depending on who the audience is, what the message was and how it has been communicated.
Corporate Communications - any communication your organisation makes internally or externally.
Stakeholders - an individual or organisation who has a vested interest in your organisation.