Line-of Sight is a communications agency helping corporations and organisations to ensure value in the huge resources spent every day on communications.
Line-of-Sight helps businesses and organisations with developing a strategy for their communication. We are offering short sparring and consultancy sessions or a more structured process.
As a fast and manageable tool to develop a strategy Line-of-Sight offers to develop a concrete communication and message plan, which could cover a twelve month period. This is a practical and efficient method to work strategic with communication. The plan will be developed in a process, where we normally will arrange two workshops for the management plus if necessary separate staff focus groups. Each workshop lasts 3-6 hours. The focus groups sessions last 2-3 hours.
It is important to have knowledge of how key stakeholders view the company. If this knowledge is not present, it can be obtained by Line-of-Sight’s concepts for measurement and market research.
Resulting is a plan on how a company or an organisation most efficient should communicate to maximize support for its business objectives. As the strategic goals for a company or an organisation frequently change fast, such a practical solution on how to communicate will be the right solution in many cases and create good results.
In the course of the first workshop the challenges of the business are translated into overall communication targets. During the second workshop the overall communication targets are translated into a communications and message plan for the coming year. If there are employee focus groups they timewise run between the two workshops and serve in addition to the important purpose of fact finding to involve the employees in the process.
The concrete communication and message plan is drafted after the second workshop and subsequently presented to the management at a meeting. If time is short the whole process may be completed within few weeks, if the company already has knowledge of how important stakeholders view the company.
There are many elements in not only developing a plan for a company’s communication, but developing a real communication strategy. And it is difficult to lay out a process, which can be used in all circumstances.
In some circumstances there will be a need for new market research measuring relations and reputation as perceived by relevant stakeholders. This can establish a need for additional action and communications.
In other situations where a company or an organisation has a clear strategy for the business, but where the management don’t communicate the strategy in a coherent, plain and understandable language, Line-of-Sight offer to facilitate the slimming down of the strategy to an easily understood statement of typically only 35 or so words, which grabs the essence of the strategy. In addition we prepare an elaborate however short paper which explains how each element in the strategy is to be understood. This will make the strategy easier to communicate and will create a basis for very clear and energy-generating gains for the organisation.
If there is a clear business strategy which is easy to communicate, Line-of Sight offers to prepare a concrete internal communication plan of how the strategy is cascaded down through the organisation. The plan rests on input from staff focus groups. Partly the aim of the plan will be to help the immediate manager to make the strategy relevant for the staff and create cohesion, a line-of-sight, between the aims of the business expressed in the strategy and the aims of the staff in their day-to-day work. Partly the aim is to help the management communicate the strategy direct to all employees through the employees’ preferred channels.
Line-of-Sight offers to develop a comprehensive communication strategy regardless of where in the process a company or an organisation needs help.
It is in fact a perfectly normal situation that a company or an organisation does not have a clearly formulated business strategy which is easy to communicate, and this is why it can be difficult to formulate a proper communication strategy. Often the business strategy stays in the minds of the top management. If this is the situation the process with developing a communication strategy will start with the management writing down the strategy for the business.
The lack of a business strategy which is easy to communicate does not prevent businesses and organisations from describing the prime business goals and challenges as they are supposed to appear in the coming year. In such cases Line-of-Sight normally recommends that businesses or organisations planning to communicate without the top management having to spend large resources on the exercise, choose to be operational and prioritize communication by drafting a concrete communication and message plan for the coming year.
News
Social media
The development online go hand in hand with a tendency, which has existed in many years in communications: New white paper on social media. April 2010. Download paper.
Overloaded managers
Communications departments demands much too much from middle managers. Opinion in Børsen 1 October 2009. Read the article.
Success without strategy
Most companies can’t say what their strategy is, but they should change. Opinion in Børsen 4 June 2009. Read the article.
Twitter and PR
The leading business daily Børsen focused on the possibilities in social media communication, when covering Line-of-Sight 27 May 2009. Read the article (Danish).