Tactical Communications 101
Campaign communication strategies for maximum impact
Every campaign is different and comes with its own challenges and nuances. And yet, with every campaign comes the same fundamental truth: somehow, you have to get people aligned behind your vision and get them to take action for your cause. You have to compete for people’s time in an over-saturated attention economy. You have to manage diverse stakeholders and audiences. You have to maintain the fidelity of your overall message while tailoring it to these different recipients.
Oh—and you have to do it on a budget.
It’s time to get tactical about this work. To employ tactical communications is to be strategic and intentional about how you communicate. It means developing the right messaging, the right balance of content, and using compelling ways of engaging with people. It involves considering structures, content, channels and approaches.
Learning to be a really great campaign communicator might be the work of a lifetime, but in this post, I’ll tell you a few of my top tactics for tightening up your comms strategy.
Tactic 1: get the content mix right
Every communication plan will require two different types of decision-making: business-as-usual communications and ad hoc messaging. Sometimes we make things hard for ourselves by thinking too short-term. We prioritise the time-sensitive email that has to go out soon over the long-term cohesive strategic plan for communication.
A focus on reactive communications can be absolutely necessary in a short-term campaigning context like an election. Some campaigns and organisations really make it a strength of their work. But, generally speaking, a lack of ongoing, broad-strokes planning can make it hard for your campaign to drive consistent and relevant messaging. Think about it: if you’re always reacting to current events and time-sensitive issues at the expense of your long-term messaging and lines to take, aren’t you letting other players drive your communication strategy? Where is your own campaign’s voice in this approach?
If you’re running an advocacy- or issue-based campaign, most of what you’re releasing through your communication channels should be planned. You can be agile with the implementation of your strategy and incorporate new data and feedback as they come in. However, all the base pieces should be in place, and they should be pieces which strongly reflect your mission and goals on your own terms.
Lessons:
Ask yourself: what’s the overall aim of this communications plan?
Don’t send something for the sake of sending something, thus sacrificing the long-term for the short-term.
Tactic 2: use complementary messaging
Regardless of the medium, your messaging should work in harmony with a wider theme. When you create a common theme across all media, you can tell a powerful story. This strategy forces you to hone in on the exact, distilled message that is most important to your campaign. This will prevent you overwhelming people by pushing out potentially conflicting messages, or distracting people with smaller issues that take away from your most powerful talking point.
Leading up to the 2015 election, the Conservative Party talked consistently about their long-term economic plan for the nation. This is a level of consistency in messaging that pays off especially well over a long campaign because the story can connect and develop. You might consider phasing your communications plan so that your initial phase pushes out the core message, while later communications can build on this work. Don’t be tempted to mix things up, and sacrifice your overall message for short-term variety.
Lessons:
Ask yourself: what is the single most vital message my campaign must send?
Find ways of delivering the same core message through different formats and channels
Tactic 3: choose the right channels
You can have the best messaging in the world and a perfectly optimal mix of content, but if people can’t access it through their preferred channel then none of it will matter. Disparate channels appeal to different users and both your content and your budget need to address that reality.
Think about how campaigners used to use consumer data. Data could develop powerful profiles that informed what kind of material people were likely to want to receive. Different types of literature and messaging could reflect the language, design, tone, layout and media preferred by different geographical areas and demographics.
It is now much harder to use this data at a more granular level than in the past. Still, the questions remain: where are people at and what’s the most cost-effective way to start reaching them? I’ve written about this topic at length before. I always recommend campaigners use technology to segment and personalise. Think about the following steps:
Start with your own email list
Then your own social media lists
Use earned over paid at first to get to the low-hanging fruit
Use your website wisely
Use more expensive interventions like texts, direct mail, phone very tactically. They can be very impactful with crucial or hard-to-reach people not responsive to your other channels but they come at a steeper cost
Lessons:
Be data-driven—use what you know about your supporters and audiences to target messaging
Be budget-wise—efficient use of contacts you already have is the best place to start
Conclusion: consistency and planning are key
I hope you can see that when you do your planning and strategising ahead of time, you can create capacity for yourself and your staff. The last thing you want is to be worrying about your regularly-scheduled messaging when it’s all hands on deck to handle a true crisis communication or develop something time-sensitive in a pinch. Set up your strategic communications plan to run well ahead of time. Much of your work should be planned and budgeted upfront so that execution is quick and easy on the day. (Do remember in times of crisis to pause scheduled comms immediately, though!)
Your messaging should be just as consistent. As the campaigner, you might worry that everyone else will get tired of the same message. Remember that you are not the audience for your own campaign. You’re receiving a very concentrated dose. As soon as it leaves your office, your campaign message has to hold its own against all sorts of other messages and distractions. Cheap communication tricks and panicky, reactive messaging doesn’t help—it hinders. Let other people dilute their messaging and use social media gimmicks as a crutch. You’ll be on time, on message and on budget.