A communication and outreach roadmap with examples — part 2 of 5

This is part two of a five-part process to creating a communication and outreach roadmap.

Just to review:

• Step 1. Define our objectives and our goals. What do we want to achieve? is covered in last week’s post here.

And at all times, let us keep in mind our guiding principle to any roadmap development:

• When it comes to communications, be transparent and genuine both internally and externally. At all times.

We need to tell people what we are doing and why. We should build our roadmap openly and clarify all steps and their details with the teams involved. The goal of being genuine and transparent when planning our outreach is general understanding and acceptance of what is planned and why by all the individuals involved.

We should also be careful to align incentives so that everyone participating in the outreach detailed in the roadmap is motivated to achieve the roadmap’s common communication objectives and goals, even if this means shifting resources from one project to another.

After that quick review, let’s move on to step two in building our communication roadmap:

Step 2. What is the current status of our desired achievement?

Conduct an analysis or a series of analyses to determine the current state of what the organisation aims to impact before the organisation does anything differently.

At one organisation where I worked, a colleague joked that everything we did was either a success or a great success because we never set us ourselves up for failure.

This is in itself a failure; how do we know how far and fast we’ve arrived at a goal if we didn’t clarify our starting point? How do we improve our allocation of resources and identify any lessons learned if we don’t analyse where we are versus where we wanted to be?

Yes, we can conduct a retroactive analysis, but such backward-facing investigations are easily biased. Since we already have our end results, we rationalise our past behaviour, justifying what we did based on what we achieved. We’ve lost any opportunity to be truly objective because we never bothered to clarify, quantify, and qualify the difference we aimed to make.

Of course if we did something and there were some results. But were these results what we intended? Are these results relevant to our long-term objectives or are they just success stories we trot out when looking for some quick funding from shallow investors?

Are we just citing me-metrics that prove we spent our time at work doing stuff (“look! I sent 500 emails out last week!”) or are we citing actual impact that resulted from our work (“out of the 500 emails I sent, 300 recipients registered and attended the event!”)

Plus a retroactive analysis doesn’t help us measure immediate progress and potentially course correct. It’s like ordering a post-mortem after failing to monitor (or even just identify) our organisational vital signs.

We will miss opportunities to improve in real time and we’re left to guess whether or not the time and money spent made any difference (“we think people like our new search interface — we don’t actually know because we never bothered asking any of our visitors about the old interface. But the budget has been spent, so let’s assume it was well-spent…”)

We don’t know if we achieved our objectives if we don’t have a before and after — we must conduct an analysis and get a baseline before we do anything. And then we must clarify how and why we expect our outreach to change things.

How do we conduct an analysis to get a good baseline?

The main idea is to clarify what we need to know (our question) and quantify and qualify the answer and what the answer means to our potential communication strategy.

I have a whole post on defining a question and setting up a proper analysis. Read it. Data analysis is easy to misunderstand — and misuse.

That said, there are a few key steps to keep in mind to get a good baseline analysis:

1. Start with a good question (and avoid a question that introduces selective bias.)
2. Categorise our question and our relevant analysis — we can’t expect wine from raisins, and we can’t expect predictions from an exploratory analysis.
3. Make sure we have access to the data that can answer our question.
4. Tidy the data.
5. Check the data. (Remember, Tidy data ≠ clean data.)
6. Compare our results with our expectations.
7. Analyse discrepancies.

As an aid, we can always use the decision tree that I posted here.

Using our example from Step 1:

Continuing with the example objectives and goals introduced in Step 1, let’s look at what analyses will be necessary for our baseline — that from which we will measure future success and use to identify areas where we can improve as we build and implement our roadmap:

Objective 1. “Get community members to recycle.”

Goal: Reduce the amount of garbage thrown out on average each month by the community.

• Analysis question: How much garbage is/has been thrown out on average by the community for the past 3 to 5 years? This is an inferential question.
• Remember to look for variables (particularly confounders) when answering this question. Variables are things that could explain dips and peaks in our data and that are unrelated to our efforts. For example, did the community grow in population during the time of the analysis? Are there any other recycling efforts in the area and when were these introduced? At any time were other incentives to decrease garbage introduced, like a tax on trash bags or an additional charge on any city pick-up of local trash?

Goal: Increase the number of aluminum cans recycled on average each month by the community.

• Analysis question: How many aluminum cans are/have been recycled on average each month by the community?
• Possible variables/confounders to consider: Do people in the community use a lot of aluminum cans? Have they ever? Is it or has it become easier or more interesting (e.g. is there a financial incentive) to recycle these cans?

Goal: Increase the amount of cardboard recycled on average each month by the community.

• Analysis question: How much cardboard is/has been recycled on average each month by the community?
• Possible variables/confounders to consider: Does the community use a lot of cardboard? Have they ever? etc.

Goal: Introduce local legislation to recycle all aluminum and cardboard used in the community and ensure over 60% of the community agrees with and backs the proposed legislation within 1 to 2 years.

• Analysis question 1: Does any existing legislation or proposed legislation regarding recycling exist, where does it come from, and what is its current status and why?
• Analysis question 2: What is the current community’s opinion about the idea of recycling legislation and why?

For analyses looking at public opinion or reviewing the history of a specific piece of legislation, I recommend outsourcing to a strong, neutral survey or similar expert group (preferably more than one) and doing a back-up media analysis of local media outlets for comparison. It is easy to run a poor survey, hard to do a good one, and best to rely on peer-reviewed experts when assessing public opinion. They may not get it exactly right, but they should be able to explain their methodology and quantify their level of uncertainty with regard to the results. Ideally, in addition to producing a clear baseline prior to our communication roadmap creation, they’ll modify and re-run the survey and media analysis at least one or two times throughout our communication strategy implementation, being careful to avoid any survey fatigue.

Objective 2. “Get community members to feel good about local recycling and environmental conservation efforts.”

Goal: Increase local positive public opinion towards recycling as it relates to environmental conservation within the community.

• Analysis question: What is the local public opinion of recycling and how does it relate to environmental conservation within the community?
• Again, we need to invest in a good survey (preferably the same survey related to legislation) and run it using a statistically valid sample of community members. And again, we have to try to avoid biasing our sample — if we only survey users who are already recycling their aluminum cans and riding around in hybrids, we may not be reflecting the real opinion of the entire community.

Goal: Increase local positive community media coverage of local recycling efforts as these efforts relate to environmental conservation at the community level.

• Analysis question: What does the local community media coverage of regional recycling efforts look like over the last two to three years?
• Invest in a targeted media analysis. We won’t regret it, and we can use any influencers, networks, or trends identified in the analysis to better inform the next few steps of our outreach strategy.

Goal: Identify, promote, and support a number of self-sustaining recycling and conservation efforts within the community in the next 1 to 2 years.

• Analysis questions: Are there any current recycling and conservation efforts within the community? What is their goal and how big is their impact?
• Investigate the community. Identify and interview existing recycling and conservation efforts. Learn from their work and their communication strategies — we won’t regret it. Identify areas where we might be able to collaborate.

Leave sufficient time for these analyses. Review the results and, if necessary, refine them.

Our analyses may alter our objectives and goals. We need to be honest about that and consider changing them.

It is possible that these analyses will invalidate a goal or even an objective (what if no one in the community uses any sort of aluminum? What if community members are already delighted to participate in local recycling projects and consider these efforts essential to the environment?)

We shouldn’t be afraid or disappointed if that happens — the analysis has just saved us from wasting time and money on something we aren’t in a position to achieve. Can we use the analysis to identify a better objective with better goals?

It is more likely that our analyses will further inform our communication strategy as a whole and help improve outreach in general. And of course, these analyses will allow us to more objectively judge the impact of the organisation’s communication strategy once we start implementing it. We know where we started, we know what we want to achieve, so we should be able to gauge how well we’re moving forward.

Next week, we’ll use our analyses to look at how well equipped our organisation is to respond to existing needs and community interests that relate to our objectives and goals. Do we need to change tactics to better achieve our objectives? Are we prepared to adequately respond to the needs and interests of our target audience?