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Most communications strategies don’t get written because the blank page is too daunting. There’s no obvious starting point, no natural order to the sections, and a nagging feeling that you don’t really know what you’re doing, even if you’ve been doing this for years. The result is that strategy documents get delayed, inherited from whoever was in the role before, or substituted with something that looks like a strategy but is really just a list of activities.
This is not a skills problem. It’s a structure problem. Once you have a clear structure to fill in, the thinking tends to follow.
Start with context and objectives, not the summary
The most common mistake in writing a communications strategy is starting with the executive summary. The summary is supposed to distil the whole thing into one page, which is impossible to write before you’ve worked out the whole thing.
Start instead with section two: context. What’s happening in the organisation, and why does communications matter right now? Then move to objectives. What are you actually trying to achieve, and how will you know when you’ve achieved it? If you can answer those two questions clearly, the rest of the strategy tends to fall into place.
The summary comes last. Write it once you know what you’re summarising.
What a communications strategy actually needs to cover
There’s no universal format, but most useful strategies cover the same ground:
- Context: what’s happening and why communications is relevant
- Objectives: what you’re trying to achieve (with measures)
- Audiences: who you’re talking to, and what you know about them
- Key messages: what you want each audience to think, feel, or do
- Channels: where and how you’ll reach each audience
- Activity plan: what you’ll actually do, and when
- Evaluation: how you’ll know if it’s working
The length depends on the organisation and the scope of the strategy. A two-person team working on a single campaign needs something different from a national organisation running a year-long programme. The structure stays roughly the same; the detail changes.
Why a first draft is always a team effort
A communications strategy that one person writes in isolation and then presents to colleagues rarely works well. The process of writing it, talking to senior leaders about objectives, testing messages with colleagues, checking channel assumptions against what you actually know about your audiences, is where most of the value comes from.
Expect the first complete draft to take several conversations across a few weeks. That’s not inefficiency; that’s how a strategy gets buy-in before it’s finalised. A strategy that took 20 minutes to write and was never discussed with anyone is not much use.
A template to get you started
The communications strategy template covers all the sections above, with guidance notes in each section explaining what to include and how to approach it. It comes as an editable Word document so you can adapt it to your organisation, and a PDF reference version.
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Communications Strategy Template
Editable Word document and PDF reference version.