Communications isn't just about social media and newsletters.
A truly integrated business communications system supports your organisational workflow. Your procedures, your paperwork and forms, your website content and promotional material are all seamlessly aligned so the information you collect and publish reinforces your business goals.
In other words, there's more to communications than slick marketing. If your business is to work seamlessly step by step then it has to have good internal comms collateral. Too often we focus our attention on the visible elements – the website, Facebook posts, the glossy brochures – and ignore the internal working.
In other words, there's more to communications than slick marketing. If your business is to work seamlessly step by step then it has to have good internal comms collateral. Too often we focus our attention on the visible elements – the website, Facebook posts, the glossy brochures – and ignore the internal working.
A good internal communications system is the thread that links your business activities together.
What's the problem?
Over the years you've accumulated a mishmash of communications collateral, a bit like an overworked pinboard. Instead of a nice tidy portfolio of up-to-date and slick-looking comms tools you find a pile of just-in-time documents and forms that aren't terribly well thought through and are almost certainly out of date.
To use the above diagram as a metaphor, your balls are all over the place.
Not at all helpful is that your comms team comprises journalism graduates and advertising gurus, who tend to keep out of the way of the technical stuff and spend their time writing newsletters and marketing strategies. The internal comms tools that actually drive the business are often left to the business developers or HR folk to put together. They aren't necessarily the best people for the job.
Communications tools should ease your work burden, not add to it. There's a skill in doing it right. The good news is that doing it right takes no more time than doing it wrong. When it's built, your integrated comms system will enable you to realise some immense benefits. Not only will your workflow be more efficient, but your staff will be over the moon about how everything just got easier.
Read our blog post: Integrated communication
To use the above diagram as a metaphor, your balls are all over the place.
Not at all helpful is that your comms team comprises journalism graduates and advertising gurus, who tend to keep out of the way of the technical stuff and spend their time writing newsletters and marketing strategies. The internal comms tools that actually drive the business are often left to the business developers or HR folk to put together. They aren't necessarily the best people for the job.
Communications tools should ease your work burden, not add to it. There's a skill in doing it right. The good news is that doing it right takes no more time than doing it wrong. When it's built, your integrated comms system will enable you to realise some immense benefits. Not only will your workflow be more efficient, but your staff will be over the moon about how everything just got easier.
Read our blog post: Integrated communication
How Impress can help you
- Assessing your existing workflow and comms collateral
- Developing a new organisational comms framework (with the help of your team)
- Meeting one-on-one with your staff to (discreetly) work out their gripes about paperwork and what they'd like to see instead
- Developing new procedures, templates and forms
- Writing clear (and easily-assessable) job and tender selection criteria
- Designing intranet/website structure and writing content
- Assisting you to develop good comms channels between your staff, between departments, and between your organisation and its clients and stakeholders