7. Managing Internal Communications Programmes

If you are called upon to manage a staff communications programme rather than simply contribute to it, then you will need to become familiar with a number of production processes as well as the actual generation of copy. Points you will need to monitor include:

• Schedules: what needs to be done by when? If you are devising your own schedule, remember to give yourself plenty of time for each step in the process, in case you miss something out or something goes wrong. It is also easier to increase the frequency of communications than to decrease them.
• Costs: apart from your own time, what is the budget allocation for photography, design, distribution and other costs such as couriers or meetings? Are the costs realistic? If you are unsure, get a few quotes for each type of activity and then add a five or ten per cent contingency figure on top.
• Images: how many do you need per issue or per month? What format do you need them in? Will you be commissioning them yourself or will they come from stock sources such as photo libraries? How many of them will be contributed free? Will there be any copyright issues? If possible, make sure that you have the budget to cover photographers’ fees.
• Design and production: will you be working alongside a designer to produce pages? What is their turnaround time? How much will they charge? Who in the client organisation will approve page designs? Remember that designers tend to charge every time you make corrections to the copy on a page, so it is best to make sure all text is fully approved before you send it off to be laid out.
• Print: who will print (or post online) the pages you plan to publish? Again, what are their turnaround times and their costs? How will you get to see proofs of the printed pages? How will printed copies be distributed to employees?
• Feedback and story generation: how will you gather leads? Is there a panel of correspondents around the business that you can use? Can you set one up? How will you measure the success of the programme?

Do not underestimate the amount of work involved in managing an internal communications programme. The job of keeping tabs on all the different stages of production, from gathering leads and getting copy approval to commissioning photography and checking proofs, can easily dwarf the amount of time you spend writing.

Different media

As with other areas of copywriting, the medium you are communicating in can have a profound impact on the style and content you employ in internal communications. Here are some considerations that you need to be aware of regarding each medium:

• Staff newspapers, newsletters or magazines will often reflect the style of a commercial publication relevant to the social mix of the workforce. In one agency I worked at, The Daily Mirror was used as a rough template for virtually all employee newspapers; other large company publications have a similar look and feel to regional papers. However, one area in which employee publications can rarely match their commercial counterparts is in frequency. Printing on anything more than a monthly schedule is usually prohibitively expensive and, because print and design are normally farmed out, the turnaround time for production can be days if not weeks. So printed media tend to be rather poor at delivering up-to-date or time-sensitive news. They are also costly, but are preferred by many organisations (and employees) because the printed page is a familiar, easy-to-read format.
• Intranets provide a cheap, quick and easy way of providing information to employees. Normal rules of web copywriting (see next chapter) apply; text must be simple and short, which makes intranets a poor medium for conveying complex or in-depth messages. Also, there can be delivery problems if employees do not have access to computers or are too busy or lazy to check the intranet for new content. On the plus side, intranet stories can easily be linked to other archive materials and text can easily be changed after it has been posted (a boon for internal spin doctors).
• Email is increasingly used for internal communications because it is cheap and easy to use. Email newsletters can be put together and distributed in a fraction of the time it takes to assemble a printed publication, and for a fraction of the cost. It is easier to quantify the benefits of the medium, too; you can measure how many people open the email and, if it is linked to stories online, how many of those get read. For obvious reasons, though, email newsletters only really work well when all the target audience has access to a computer, so their application is limited in sectors such as manufacturing.
• Business television is still something of a rarity but is likely to increase in popularity as traditional broadcast systems are replaced by digital distribution via corporate networks. For those entrusted with producing content, the onus is not so much on copywriting as on finding material that will provide good images: interviews, location shots and so on. The medium is still relatively expensive and can suffer from distribution problems if staff cannot all get to a screen. But it remains a good medium, other than a face-to-face meeting, for issuing critical news where people really need to know exactly what is being said.
• Other types of media used in internal communications range from information-based screen savers to CD-ROMs, although none of these at present looks likely to achieve the popularity of the methods described above. There is one final type of communication, however, that should be mentioned: talking. This supersedes every other form in its effectiveness and you will rarely go wrong by recommending it as a means of improving internal communications.