Summer Refresh: Conducting a Communication Audit

Summer isn’t just about sunshine and vacations—it’s also the perfect time for organizations, particularly school districts, to take a step back, evaluate their communication strategies, and optimize processes for the upcoming year with a communication audit.

Ensuring your messaging is clear, consistent, and engaging is key to building trust, improving efficiency, and strengthening your community. This “summer refresh” can set the stage for a more effective and impactful year.

In this blog, we’ll walk through the key steps of conducting a communication audit. From evaluating your current channels to gathering stakeholder feedback and refining workflows, this guide will help you make the most of summer so your organization is set up for success in the months ahead. Let’s get started!

A communication audit thoroughly evaluates your organization’s current communication strategies, tools, and processes. It’s essentially a deep dive into how your organization is engaging with stakeholders. By assessing what’s working and what needs fine-tuning, you can refine your approach and ensure your messages truly resonate.

Benefits of a Communication Audit:

• Better Engagement: Ensure your audience receives clear, compelling, and timely updates.
• Stronger Trust: Transparent and consistent messaging fosters trust and credibility.
• Optimized Resources: Reduce time spent on inefficient communication tools and redundant processes.

1. Review Your Communication Channels

Start by taking stock of the communication platforms you rely on—email, website updates, social media, and phone alerts. Evaluate how effectively each one is serving your audience and meeting your goals.

• Which platforms are driving the most engagement?
• Is your messaging consistent across all channels and aligned with current best practices?
• Have you shared messages on multiple platforms?
• At what frequency are you sharing and posting information?
• Is there a need to balance informing your stakeholders without overwhelming them with information?
• Can you upgrade your technology or platforms to improve your communications efforts?

By asking yourself these questions, you will begin to identify what’s working and what needs adjustment.

2. Gather Stakeholder Feedback

Engage your staff, community, and leadership teams to understand their communication preferences and identify any barriers in your current approach. Their insights will help you prioritize platforms and refine your messaging. Some guiding questions include:

• How do you prefer to receive important updates?
• What types of information would you like to see from [your students’ teacher, principal or from the district OR our organization]?
• When you need information, where do you first go to find it?

This information will help you determine what platforms to prioritize and help inform your communication goals moving forward.

A note from our Account Lead & IGPR Marketing Manager:
A recent study from School CEO titled “What Parents Want” showed that the school website is a primary source of information for parents, while social media is not their first choice. Knowing this, a school district can prioritize using the school district website as the “hub” of information, ensuring that social posts, email communications and other tools are driving back to the website source.
If we stick with schools as an example, a community member may say they want to see how their tax dollars are spent. This would transform the district’s communication goals and messaging to prioritize finances from informational campaigns to providing facts in order to tie student and staff storytelling back to that community priority.

3. Research Best Practices

If there is one thing we know to be true, the world of communication is constantly changing! After reviewing where you are as an organization and how your stakeholders hope to be communicated with, it is important to review best practices. Whether for social media platforms or maintaining and updating your website, having a strong understanding of the current communications landscape is crucial to successfully executing your strategies.

A note from our Account Lead & IGPR Marketing Manager:
Our clients often ask us how often they should post on social media. The short answer is 1-2 times a day on most platforms. However, the most important thing is that you are consistent. Posting 2-3 times per week will always be better than 5 times one week and zero times the next.

In general, as you think about communication best practices, here are some of our key practices for the most significant impact:

• Use your website as an information hub.
  Direct newsletters, social media posts, and news stories back to the website to provide additional details and context. Ensure information is updated regularly and easily accessible. Review your analytics to determine the most visited pages and refine what needs quicker access or more clearly called out.
• Send an information newsletter.
  With your audience in mind, create a digital or print newsletter from your organization that includes a message from you, key dates, notes and updates on important issues, and a positive and human-centered story. Incorporating print and digital versions of this is a great way to reach younger and older audiences.
• Tell your story on social media.
  So many great things are happening in your organization. But if you are not sharing all of them, someone else is telling your story, and you may or may not know what that story is. Using social media as your key tool for storytelling, share and capture moments that align with your broader message, but dive deep into the impact—how it affects your people! Keeping posts consistent (ideally, three or more times per week) will yield the best results for your engagement.
• Keep mass communication tools for time-sensitive or emergency situations.
  Because we are inundated with information, it is easy for information to get lost in the shuffle. When thinking about how to use your mass communication tools, it is ideal to use them sparingly and for time-sensitive, safety-related or emergency-related updates like school closures.
• Don’t forget about in-person communication as a tool in your toolbox.
  Word of mouth is still the number one tool for both marketing and communication. Although it can’t always happen, connecting with your entire organization from top to bottom will improve your team’s trust and help build your credibility in times of crisis.

4. Develop an Action Plan

A communication audit is only valuable if it leads to change. With a better understanding of where you are and where you want to go, you can develop a communications plan that supports your goals and strategic planning efforts while building trust in your organization.

The key is doing what you say you will do. Assign responsibilities, set goals, and create a roadmap of strategies for implementing improvements. Then, share these updates with your team so they’re prepared when you begin launching and implementing your plan.

Communication audits aren’t just about fixing what’s broken—they’re about setting your organization up for long-term success. By evaluating and enhancing communication and workflows now, you’ll ensure a smoother, more connected, and more effective year ahead.

What is a communication audit?

A communication audit is a thorough evaluation of your organization’s current communication strategies, tools, and processes. It’s essentially a deep dive into how your organization engages with stakeholders.