Warren Buffett, successful business tycoon, once said, “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” This quote focuses on the value of planning because motivated communicators take the time to strategically plan for themselves and others. Planning is the foundation that helps us project our objectives and achieve our goals. There are many important resources that discuss the value of planning, but we want to focus on Presspage, a strategy and planning resource that has good tips to guide us through the steps of a good plan.
This website is selling a service, but we’re not profiting from sharing it. However, it does have great information for determining the important elements of communication planning. We might not always have to go into grave detail about each of these elements in every plan, but they can help keep us on track to meet our goals. This website goes into detail of each step, in hopes to help you create an organized method of planning.
Why should you care about planning?
When we have a planning process, we’re better equipped to prepare for the future. Planning helps us foresee any calculated mishaps. Of course, we’re going to have to deal with surprises, but we can at least have an action plan if something does go wrong. Planning also teaches us how we can stay on schedule. Just like we have deadlines in school, we’re going to have deadlines in the workplace as well.
We’ll now guide you through the step by step process of planning.
Step 1
The foundation of our plan starts with the situation, which explains exactly why we’re planning in the first place. We wrote this blog in order to inform COM students about the value of Public Relations topics.
Step 2
The next step is understanding our audience, which has the biggest retention for COM students. Whether we’re writing or speaking, we always have to think about our audience. We even planned this blog with a specific audience in mind.
Step 3
Once you’ve figured out the first two elements, you can move on to your goals & objectives. Goals are what you want to accomplish overall, and objectives are specific outcomes that utilize the SMART method – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, & Time-bound. When we planned to promote our blog, one of our goals was to create awareness for Public Relations. Our specific objective would be to get 15-20 engagements on our blog over the semester.
Step 4
We can then use strategies to achieve our objectives and tactics to support the strategies. Essentially, strategies explain why, and tactics explain how. One strategy for our blog promotion was to use print media to attract students to interact with our blog. The specific tactic was to post flyers in buildings on campus.
Step 5
Another element is the calendar/timetable, which details specific tasks and due dates for when we want to achieve the goals and objectives of our plan. Our blog calendar focuses on what each person is doing and when it’s due. Each blog posted was specifically planned.
Step 6
Budgets are another element of plans but depending on the situation they won’t always be necessary. This part of the plan ensures that you have all the required resources for achieving your goals. If we were to have a budget for this blog, it might be focused towards our social media strategies where we would possibly buy paid advertisements.
Step 7
The final element is evaluation. Once we’ve completed our plan, this step will tell us how successful we were in achieving our objectives. At the end of the semester, we intend to evaluate the success of our blog by reflecting the objectives of our plan.
Lasting Thoughts
Overall, it’s important to be aware of the resources we can utilized while planning for assignments, weekend plans, and especially for our futures. If we can understand how to plan well, we are setting ourselves up for success in all aspects of our lives. Thoughtful and well-researched planning strategies are invaluable to our roles as communication professionals.
Next week, we will dive into a case study on the topics of audiences/publics, branding, and planning. This case study will lay out exactly how these three PR topics work well together in any organization.