What if your comms plan didn't fall apart every quarter?
Every comms team I’ve worked with has the same challenge: a great communications plan on paper and then life happens - the legislative session scrambles the policy agenda, a project isn’t fully funded, a new staffer is hired - and the comms plan falls apart within weeks.
This post lays out a three meeting system to help your comms plan bend but not fall apart throughout the year.
The advocacy campaigns that succeed are ones that communicate often, with consistency and clarity. But that’s easier said than done. Because it’s not just about one advocacy campaign, standing alone. It’s nested in your nonprofit’s overall comms plan. The management of your entire organization’s communications influences whether you can stay on top of – and even be proactive – with an advocacy campaign’s communications.
When I led a communications team, one of my team members would (exhaustedly) refer to “feeding the content beast”: the e-mails, social media, press releases, website updates, print newsletters, annual reports, and on and on.
I know what it feels like to be on a content hamster wheel, racing to keep up. I’ve felt this both as an E.D. of a small grassroots advocacy group and as the V.P. of Communications for a large regional advocacy organization. It’s so easy for comms to slip into a scramble, leading to frustration and missed opportunities.
After 25 years or so of leading nonprofit communications teams and advocacy campaigns, I finally figured out – through trial and error – a content process that worked. It combines content strategy and project management, the two pieces needed to keep your content process moving smoothly and strategically.
It won’t magically fix all of your team’s problems but it will ease the chaos and help you stay on a more proactive than reactive footing.
The goal: To get processes in place to help your comms team adapt to changing plans without losing your whole strategy, give you the space to jump on key advocacy moments, and not lose track of the important but not urgent items that always slip.
The Content Planning & Management Process
At its core, this process is a regular cadence of three types of meetings throughout the year. You can adapt this for any size team, whether you're a big organization with a comms team or you’re a comms team of one.
Here’s how it works.
Weekly Communications Team Meeting
Goal: Keep your comms team & content production coordinated
Purpose: Project Management
Time Commitment: Less than 30 minutes every Monday morning
Attendees: The comms team
The weekly meeting is all about project management. What’s on deck for the week? Who is doing what? Any road blocks, changes? That’s it. This keeps your communications team coordinated, limits surprises, and helps you adapt quickly along the way.
If you can only change one thing right now, adding a weekly communications team meeting is where to start. It’s an opportunity to (briefly) slow down, take a breath, and get organized.
Yearly Communications Planning Meeting
Goal: Sketch out your communications plan for the next 12-18 months
Purpose: Strategy
Time Commitment: Full day workshop once a year
Attendees: The comms team for the full meeting. Pull in others (fundraising, key program leads, leadership, etc.) for parts of the meeting.
There are two pieces to this yearly planning meeting: review of the previous year and mapping out your communications themes and plan for the coming year. Sketching out your year helps pull you out of purely reactive planning and gives you a rough plan to adapt throughout the year.
Quarterly Review & Planning
Goal: Develop a detailed communications plan for the next three months
Purpose: Project Management & Strategy
Time Commitment: ½ day (3-4 hours) per quarter
Attendees: The comms team for the entire meeting. Others (fundraising, program, leadership, etc.) as needed.
In this meeting you’ll straddle strategic communications planning with more detailed project management. It involves three parts: quarterly content audit review, communications metrics review, and detailed communications project planning for the next three months.
Free Toolkit: From Scramble to System
I’ve put this all together, with sample agendas and discussion questions, into a free toolkit: From Scramble to System: A Nonprofit Guide to Communications Planning.
It includes:
An in-depth look at the three meeting types and how they fit together
Sample agendas and discussion questions for each meeting
Tips for where to start for your team
How It All Works Together
These three meetings aren't separate items on your calendar. They're one system to combine strategy and project management, the two pieces needed to keep your content process moving smoothly and strategically.
Your yearly meeting sets the direction. Your quarterly meeting turns that direction into an actual plan. Your weekly meeting keeps that plan moving, week by week.
But the information doesn't just flow one way. What comes up in a Monday stand-up — a delay, a new idea, a coalition call that changes your timeline — feeds into your next quarterly meeting, where you adjust the plan to match reality. And what you learn over a year of quarterly check-ins feeds into your next yearly plan, where you set direction again with everything you've learned.
Getting Started
Shifting to this annual planning process may feel like a lot. And that’s ok. Start where you can and add on as you go.
If you only adopt one thing from this series, it’s to start a weekly comms team meeting. It will start slowing down the scramble, where you’re racing to keep up but feeling like you’re going nowhere.
In the toolkit, I suggested agendas and timelines, but I encourage you to adapt this to what works for your team. But, as you adapt, be sure to remember the two fundamental pieces - strategy and project management - and don’t lean too heavily into one or another. The balance is what will help you get off the content hamster wheel.