Finalising your approach
Sign-off and ownership: external communications
Whether your project is large or small, you need to think about your approach to communications. The success of your project is likely to be partly dependent on how well you communicate with your external stakeholders. As a minimum, your partners, the local community and other stakeholders need to know what you are doing, how they can get involved and what the outcomes are, when the project is finished. Each project will also have some specific communication needs of its own. You should make sure that these needs have been identified, and decide how to meet them. You need to make sure you tie up the key messages being communicated, ensuring that the community engagement project can be adapted, made relevant and is understood by all stakeholders.
To get you started, here are some questions for you to think about. If the project is large or complex, or you are very new to communications work, it is a good idea to get people with specific communications skills to work with you. Their experience and skills will prove invaluable as you plan and execute a communications strategy.
Communications can be an area where collaborative working between the Force and the Authority is particularly beneficial. Joint working can provide extra resources for the project, bring in a wider range of perspectives and experience, and strengthen the relationship between the two organisations, which may be an organisational objective for your Force or Authority in itself.
Quick questions:
- What expertise can you draw on internally/ from partners/ from local people to help you plan and deliver your communications strategy?
- What are your communication goals (eg information sharing, awareness raising, public reassurance etc)?
- Who do you want to reach?
- What influence/impact do you want to have?
- What methods should be used to communicate with each of the identified 'key audiences' at each stage of the project?
- What is an appropriate timescale for communications activity, so as to ensure maximum effectiveness and impact (eg to fit with deadlines for local papers/ to give local people who want to participate enough notice of events etc)?
- How can we enlist the help of others, particularly members of the community, in 'telling the story' or 'spreading the word'?
- If we want to communicate with individuals/ communities who may have low levels of trust in the police, how can we best do this? What work needs to be done to facilitate open and productive dialogue in these circumstances?
- How will we monitor the effectiveness of our communications? How will we use that information to re-shape our approach, where necessary?
- What are the cost implications of these activities, and how will they be funded?
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