Integrating Internal and External Components Into a Communications Strategy

By Ambika Sharma, Development Alternatives (DA)
May 2001

The objectives should be to develop an integrated communications strategy for both internal and external communications using state-of-the-art Web technologies.

Get a New Communications Culture

Overlooking the strategic impact of the Web is a huge mistake. To treat the Web as if it were an online brochure and manage it out of the operations department could be disastrous. The Web should be considered one of the most important determinants for the way you will do business in the future.

The internal communications component needs to be managed very differently from the external communications component. The key difference is that the former is more inward looking and represents your organizations in-house flows, while the latter is what you need to project to the outside world.

These days it is not enough to do great communications work. We also need to prove it to people in-house who may not intuitively understand the value of what we accomplish in order to help our organizations succeed.

How Do You Prove That Internal Communication Helps Drive Overall Communication Goals? Measure It!

• Connect communication activities with project results and income-generating means for the organization.
• Set measurable communication objectives that are aligned with organizational goals, i.e., ways that the communication work done in the organization measures up directly or indirectly with its mandate.
• Identify specific measurement approaches to use in different situations, including objective analysis, benchmarking, interviews, focus groups or surveys.
• Translate qualitative findings into more concrete reports that capture the management's attention.

One way to start developing an integrated communications strategy is to look at the nature of the different kinds of work the team will be doing and what kind of communication is needed to support that work.

Communications messages do not operate in a vacuum. Your organization must commit to reinforce the perceptions conveyed by the communications message. It must be built to last. While the message should present you in the most positive light, in the long run it is counter-productive to oversell or over-promise.

SD Case Study

Integrated Communications Strategy – A New Approach
Learn how Development Alternatives decided to ensure that communication and advocacy became key components of all DA activities—both to raise the profile of DA and of specific sustainable development issues in India.