Strategic Communications Planning Can Help Drive Your Success
by Michael Kornfeld

A sound communications plan, like a good business plan, provides you with a roadmap for where you want to go. It outlines the steps you need to take and the resources you need to get there –including communications vehicles — and provides opportunities for tune-ups along the way.

Ten steps to help drive your strategic communications planning efforts follow:

1. Pave the Way: Organizational or venue mission statements and goals set clear, concise definition and focus. Your mission and goals should drive your communications plans and activities. This applies to promoting venues and concert series in general, as well as individual concerts, festivals or other events.

2. Identify Key Audiences: This is integral to creating a good communications plan.

3. Conduct Audience Research: Surveys and focus groups help assess their interests, needs, knowledge and perceptions, as well as information sources. However, this step can be time-consuming and is optional.

4. Rev Up: Setting communications objectives. What do you hope to achieve through your communications, marketing and public relations efforts? How are you trying to position your organization/venue and why?

5. Select Appropriate Communications Vehicles: In choosing from among a wide array of potential communications vehicles, think of what you are hoping to achieve. In many cases, you’ll want to use a combination of approaches – including media relations, online communications, brochures and fliers, direct mail, etc. With respect to costs, one vehicle may be cheaper than another but may not effectively reach your target audience.

6. Fill Your Engine: Your key messages should flow directly from your communications objectives.

7. Plan Your Trip: Outline your planned communications activities.

8. Map a Strategy for Achieving Your Desired Results: This involves the integration of your marketing and public relations goals.

9. Pull the Plan Together: This includes linking its various elements and denoting who is responsible for what, how and when. Venues and organizations sponsoring concerts or festivals should seek to effectively partner with artists, artists’ representatives or publicists in promotional efforts for individual concerts, recognizing what each brings to the equation.

10. Evaluate the Plan: Put some mechanism(s) in place to enable you to determine how well you did in achieving your plan’s objectives and in getting your key messages across to your key stakeholders/audiences. Ideally, evaluation should be part of an ongoing process that enables you to fine-tune your fluid communications plan along the way and not get stuck in any potential communications potholes. Recognize, however, that despite all your best efforts in getting the word out, you cannot guarantee that the seats will be filled.

Specialized crisis communications plans help prepare you for possible bumps in the road by recognizing that accidents (crises) can happen.

This 10-point primer was distributed to concert presenters, promoters and artists who attended a workshop entitled “Tooting a Better Horn: Effective Promotion for Small and Large Venues” during the Northeast Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA) Conference on November 12, 2006.