4-Step Communication Strategy Framework: demystify communications strategy

The 4-Step Communications Strategy Framework demystifies communication strategy.

Developing a comms strategy is not as hard as most strategists would have you believe. Actually implementing communications is a bigger challenge, but without a strategy you’re just spinning wheels: lots of activity, but no progress. 

The 4-Step Communication Strategy Framework boils your strategy down to four interlinked tables, and clearly distinguishes between what makes up a communications strategy and what are merely communications tactics. As a result, your strategy will be easily understood by everyone in your organisation. And that understanding is critical, because without both the input and buy-in of your colleagues, your strategy won't have impact.

Who are these course for, and What do they do?

These courses are for everyone who’s been asked to develop their organisation’s communication strategy and don’t know where to start.

They explain the Communication Strategy Framework and help you apply it to your organisation. Depending on the course you select, you will create:

• either an "executive summary" of your organisation's communications strategy,
• or a much more detailed full strategy, along with a useful internal communications tool to magnify buy-in across your organisation.

The executive summary version is a good place to start if your organisation has little or no insight into its audiences, as it will help create the management consensus you'll need before you embark on audience research. Moreover, it comes with a 100% discount to the full version - i.e., the price you paid for the executive summary course is deducted from the price of the full strategy course, so you can upgrade easily.

What you'll get

Executive Summary version

5 videos (32 minutes total) and 1 downloadable:

• Video 1: Introducing the course and the 4-Step Communication Strategy Framework (4m)
• Video 2: Audiences and Messaging (3m40): the first two steps - and the first two tables - of the Framework concern who you are trying to reach, what you want to say to them, and why both you and they should care.
• Video 3: your Communications Portfolio, Optimised (9m30): the last two steps - and the last two tables - of the Communication Strategy Framework set out your portfolio of communications products, activities and channels, and how you'll optimise it.
• Video 4: Introducing the Word templates (4m30)
• Video 5: How to use the Executive Summary template (10m37)
• Document: executive summary Word template (7 pages)

Full Strategy version

5 videos (52 minutes total) and 2 downloadables:

• Video 1-4: as for the Executive Summary version, above
• Video 5: How to use the Full Strategy template and the Poster download (30m38)
• Documents: Full Strategy Word template (35 pages), Poster Word template (1 page, A3 / 11" x 17").

Note: templates are copyrighted and not for redistribution - i.e., licensed for use by the person taking the course only.

Additional materials and questions

You can ask me questions via dedicated social posts (Medium, Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn or X), and apart from responding there I'll add supplemental materials to the most relevant part of the course so others can benefit.

Who am I?

I trained as a theoretical physicist before coming to Brussels as a science journalist in the early 90s, and stayed to become a science writer. I’d been on the internet since the late 1980s, however, and ended up building the first database-driven website for any European institution in 1995.

I’ve focused on online comms ever since, but from Day One always sought to integrate my clients' online presence into the rest of their comms activities: your website, after all, is the one comms tactic which must support, and be supported by, all other comms activities. 

So every time I’ve been asked to build someone a website, I’ve asked for their overall communications strategy. And every time I’ve been disappointed. Generally I’m emailed a longwinded document which Sun Tzu would describe as “the noise before defeat”, lovingly listing various communications tactics — “we do press relations and hold events and have a website and a bunch of publications …” — each written by the respective team. But never do I find a clear explanation of the Why or the Who underpinning it all, let alone a coherent comms portfolio backed up by a rigorous, data-driven optimisation process. 

So I developed the Framework to help my clients figure out their overall comms strategy. It was the only way I could be sure that the website I built them would be fit-for-purpose.

The Communications Strategy Framework is therefore not a theoretical approach based on years of University study — it is a practical approach based on over 30 years of solving communications problems.