Developing your plan for communication

OK, so this is easy its to  create engaging, motivational communications to recruit more adults to help run your scout group. 

Who are you trying to reach? Knowing your audience makes it possible to plan your communications logically. You'll need different messages for different audiences, and you'll need different channels and methods to reach each of those groups of people.

There are many ways to think about your audiences and the best ways to contact them. Think about what audiences you want to focus on.

When creating your message, consider content, mood, language, and design. Remember to take into consideration of our brand position and the two key elements, Skills for life, which is our key benefit and belonging, which is what we feel.

What does your intended audience read, listen to, watch, or engage in? To succeed you need to reach them by placing your message where they’ll see it.

The channels you choose to publicise your volunteering opportunities depends on the people you want your messages to reach. Of course, the channel(s) you choose will depend on your goals, but it's important as you're writing your communication plan that you keep your distribution methods in-mind.

Any number of things can happen in the course of a recruitment campaign. Someone can forget to e-mail a press release or forget to include a phone number or e-mail address. A crucial word on your posters or leaflets can be misspelled, or an article posted on a web site might get important information wrong.

It’s important to try to anticipate these kinds of problems, and plan to deal with them. ‘Challenge’ planning should be part of any communication plan, so you’ll know what to do when a problem occurs. Your plans should include who takes responsibility for what – dealing with the external supporters, correcting errors, deciding when something has to be redone rather than fixed, etc. It should cover as many situations, and as many aspects of each situation, as possible.

The people that can help you spread your message can vary from formal community leaders – the parents of your members, owners of local businesses, clergy, etc. Institutions and organisations, such as colleges, hospitals, clubs and faith communities, all have access to groups of community members who could be interested in getting involved with your scout group.

Now the task is to put it all together into a plan that you can act on. By the time you reach this point, your plan is already done, for the most part. You know what your purpose is and whom you need to reach to accomplish it, what your message should contain and look like, what you can afford, what problems you might face, what channels can best be used to reach your intended audience, and how to gain access to those channels.

Now it’s just a matter of putting the details together – composing and designing your message (or messages, if using multiple channels), making contact with the people who can help you, and getting everything in place to start your communication effort. And finally, you'll evaluate your effort so that you can continue to make it better.

If you evaluate your communication plan in terms of both how well you carry it out and how well it works, you’ll be able to make changes to improve it. It will keep getting more effective each time you implement it.