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Communications Audits: Your Customers Speak
By Just Pen, Creative Commons
Ever ask the question — what’s wrong with this picture? A communications audit is the way to find out.
For alumni associations, fundraising organizations and advancement offices striving to cultivate more effective engagement and support, a communications audit will help you assess your staff structures and the effectiveness of your communications programs. What’s more, you can act on the answers immediately, recalibrating to enhance branding and relationship-building.
Audits let you know how your customers — internal and external — see you, in no uncertain terms. Is your staff organized appropriately for the need? Are you leading them effectively? Are your messages and materials truly advancing your relationships with your customers, or are you wasting your time, energy and dwindling budget dollars?
The data produced by a communications audit also tends to be quite persuasive — and justifies making important adjustments in the way your team conducts its activities. A thorough audit places a laser-like lens on an organization’s marketing strategies, activities, processes and, importantly, behaviors. And then it sets a new course for the future.
Keep these criteria in mind as you consider a communications audit:
- Audits that ask the tough questions provide a big picture assessment of strategic communications operations.
- Audits challenge assumptions that may have been driven your activities for a long time and provide hard data that can be measured, managed and foster alternatives.
- Audits are creative. They surface new ideas and innovative approaches because your staff and internal external colleagues help define what will work better for them.
- Audits are more than SWOTs. Through interviews, questionnaires, surveys and materials review, they yield information and connect the dots, leading to strategic communications structures and plans based on analysis, evaluation and goals.
To launch an audit, know what you want to accomplish and measure even if you don’t know how to get there. Keep the end in mind. What is the outcome you seek? And how open is your organization to implementing the findings and willing to make some tough decisions? How can you move the dial to make an audit successful and gain leadership support for necessary changes?
Moving forward toward the outcomes you seek, yet working with less, means applying new and streamlined ways of advancing your staff’s mission to engage the market. A communications audit can put you in position for new connectivity and engagement with your constituents and customers, stronger internal communications partnerships and measurable ROI.
A Pleasant Diversion: Isabel Allende on Writing
This is a pleasant diversion — the opportunity to hear author Isabel Allende talk about writing Island Beneath the Sea, a novel that captures the revolutionary history of Haiti as it became the world’s first black republic. “I wasn’t planning to write this book — I was planning to write about the pirates of the Caribbean — and that was before Johnny Depp,” Allende remarked with a wide grin at an author luncheon at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. In New Orleans at the time, Allende was researching the pirates and became captivated by their link to the slave revolt that led to the formation of the republic of Haiti in 1804.
“I spent four years researching the history,” she said. “All the historical facts in the book are true – it is fiction based on fact.” While Allende’s books often are published first in Spanish (she writes in Spanish), the hardcover edition of Island Beneath the Sea in English occurred last year, coincident with the massive earthquake in Haiti, focusing an unusual lens on the story. ”The people of Haiti have been betrayed by everyone throughout history,” she mused. And, not only everyone but everything, it would seem, including the dire forces of nature.
In answering questions about her process, Allende confessed that she “got very sick” while writing this book. “I don’t have a plan for a book. It sort of moves here and there. I’m told my getting sick is psychosomatic, but I was very sick for two years — I couldn’t sleep lying down. So now I know when I’m going to write, I’m going to get sick.”
A former journalist, Allende was 39 when she started her first book, the absorbing novel of magical realism, The House of Spirits. “It started as a letter…The things that have happened in my life happened by chance. In fact, all the plans I’ve made have never materialized. So if you are open to risk…” Her prodigious output is now 16 novels and nonfiction volumes, with the next about to be putblished in Spanish before its U.S. release in 2012. And she is quite a multi-tasker. While writing Island Beneath the Sea, she also worked on her memoir, The Sum of Our Days. That book, too, was unfolding in real time. “I write a letter to my mother every day, so I go into the closet for the letters my mother returns to me every year.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard Allende speak; I had interviewed her in the late ’80s when I was I was editor of the “Personalities Page” in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday Magazine. She was one of about 400 celebrities I’d interviewed about their creative passion each week for the magazine page between 1986 and the early ’90s.
Now Allende lives in San Rafael, California, not far from Book Passage and is a generous participant in Marin County, lending her name and energy to artistic and humanitarian causes. One of those is her foundation supporting women and children, begun 16 years ago in honor of her daughter Paula, who died suddenly and tragically in 1992. The book Paula is a moving personal and family memoir. Gifts to the foundation go directly, she said, “to the organizations we support.”
University PR Offices and Alumni: A Disconnect?
Many university public relations offices seem to have a tin ear when it comes to the potential power of harnessing alumni voices for strategic campaigns – such as legislative advocacy. And it’s a missed opportunity. Monovision in the PR office is not what’s needed at a time when making the case for investing in education is vital to universities, the workforce and the economy.
Typically lobbying state and federal officials is the role of government relations experts, who work in external affairs, public affairs or university relations – and they are pros. With education funding an extraordinary challenge in the current political environment, the job is intense and requires strategic focus on institutional messaging, timing, politics and relationship-building. Given the stakes, it’s not something you unwittingly want to hand over to amateurs. Well-meaning people you can’t control in their well-meaningness may go off script and do more harm than good.
It’s also understood that university lobbyists would automatically call on those in their immediate field of vision – presidents and administrators, students, faculty and staff — who can make an impassioned showing in state capitals. Often alumni are in the mix but not always in focus. While there’s a long tradition of alumni advocacy on behalf of higher education going back to the 19th century, these activities are considerably stronger when they’re part of a comprehensive institutional strategy.
Things are changing, as I’ve chronicled in this new advocacy whitepaper and best practices summary. The opportunity to engage thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of alumni to build support for their institutions is nothing to scoff at in a competitive global marketplace for talent. What’s more, alumni represent what education actually achieves and why the investment is right – in state capitals and local communities they are putting their education to work on behalf of the economy and the quality of life for everyone. In their five-year strategic plans, the University of Tennessee Alumni Association and the University of Minnesota Alumni Association have joined the growing number of alumni organizations making advocacy a priority initiative aligned with institutional goals.
Dozens of other public universities and their alumni associations have joined for visibility in state legislatures through thoughtful, well-designed programs and collaborations between alumni relations and public affairs. As one government relations director told me recently, “we have the strategy and the position papers, the alumni association has direct access to the alumni we need to get involved with us.” Curiously in California, where the University of California faces $500 million-plus in cuts and has organized various advocacy activities, only the University of California-Berkeley – one of 10 campuses in the system — has positioned advocacy prominently on its alumni association website.
Private universities also are promoting advocacy through economic impact studies and other project-based efforts. Through a broad constituency campaign that included alumni, DePaul University recently succeeded in convincing Illinois state legislators to restore funding for a financial aid program that, if lost, would have put college out of reach for a large number of its students. Describing the campaign at the recent annual conference of the Public Relations Society of America’s Counselors to Higher Education section, DePaul vice president Cheryl Procter-Rogers said. “We’re focused on outcomes. That means creating a leadership position, developing a strategy and building collaborative teams.”
Generating enthusiasm and support for the institutions that higher ed’s PR counselors represent is PR at its essence.
Alumni Communicators: Reframe Your “Case for Support”
Evolving technologies keep alumni communicators on a reactive whirl. A new idea to test, a new format to try — all with the purpose of keeping the alumni information “churn” going. But what’s the communications strategy that will both create value for alumni and yield ROI for the institution’s overall goals for increased support of various forms? 
Alumni as a whole and in discreet groups are powerful networks that can be harnessed for many purposes. They want to be engaged with each other and the institution, but often alumni are not asked nor given the tools to harness their support in targeted ways. Good models for the potential of alumni networks can be found in the Obama presidential campaign and the Tea Party movement, which have applied a strategic direction, smart use of technology and an array of communications tools to advance their objectives.
In our experience, alumni communications offices miss the big picture because they are typically understaffed, underfunded and stretched thin with tactical responsibilities for promoting events and pushing out information. Often they are middle managers who have the will but neither the budgets, the time or the strategic experience to offer the 35,000-foot view.
However, just as strategic development communications became more central to fundraising campaigns a decade ago, alumni communicators are rising to senior positions as part of advancement leadership teams in forward-looking institutions today. This takes both vision and investment from senior leadership.
In our recent alumni association strategic planning project with The Napa Group, we defined alumni communications best practices and provided a roadmap for strategic investment. We’ll talk about this at the CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders on July 18 in New York City. Check out our presentation, Reenvisioning Alumni Associations for the 21st Century.
One popular assumption that needs to be challenged early is that the rise of social media makes effective communication “free” of cost. While new technologies have provided more online options and relieved print budgets, it’s people who are going to get the job done. And their time isn’t free. In fact, they are busier than ever because they have more tools at their disposal and are expected to use them all appropriately — sending emails to chapters, updating websites, managing social media, creating print materials and advancing institutional goals.
These top trends in ”best practice” alumni communications provide the foundation for the “case for support” for enhanced investment:
- Strategic planning: Alumni associations recognize that they must prove their relevance in the face of all other groups competing for their constituents. The savvy associations are reshaping themselves to deliver market-focused programs through strategic planning. Increasingly associations, like UCLA Alumni, are rebranding themselves as the lifelong link between alumni and the university, shifting perceptions that position the association as a major contributor to the institution’s overall success.
- Market research: Alumni associations have used various forms of market research to (a) identify their key value to their alumni and (b) reinforce that value consistently throughout all forms of communications – including print, online, social media, personal visits and events.
- Website portal: As lifetime links between alumni and the university, associations are converting their websites to information services to inform and engage alumni in the university’s life, not just the association’s. Coordinated with institutional websites, alumni websites connect alumni to the university’s story while fostering relationships among alumni.
- Strategic communications: Alumni communications professionals are rising to strategic leadership in overall advancement operations, just like their development communications colleagues began to do a decade ago. They are advising their institutional colleagues and coordinating efforts to reach and engage alumni in targeted ways.
- Communications leadership: Such higher-level leadership roles also require that alumni communicators measure the effectiveness of traditional and emerging communications, including the realignment of print, electronic, online and social media for strategic outcomes.
- Social media networks: The rapid rise of new technologies, such as social media and mobile communications, are powering alumni networks. Alumni communicators must understand how to apply these tools as part of the overall marketing mix.
A communications audit is an excellent first step to launch this strategic approach because it delivers unvarnished facts, needs and opportunities from staff and alumni audiences – and creates a roadmap for the future.
What are the key elements of your alumni communications “case for support?”