In December 2022, the SOS for Education coalition, which brings together dozens of organisations concerned about the state of Polish education, asked me to write a communication strategy document for the October 2023 parliamentary elections.
I had written a few communication and marketing strategies in my life, but this one was special. The target audience was not only a few interest groups – in this case teachers and parents, among others. But also a small group of politicians.
Resources and objectives
When working on any strategy or plan, you need to have a good understanding of the organisation’s objectives. This may seem obvious, but in fact problems can often be identified at this stage. It is also important to identify the resources the organisation has and plans to have in the near future. Anything goes on paper. But a good strategy is one that can be put into practice.
That’s why the first thing I did was to hold a series of intensive workshops with the organisation, lasting about 12 hours. It quickly became clear that the organisation needed a plan rather than a typical communications strategy – two plans, in fact. One for the next 2 months and the other for the next 10 months.
Operationalisation of the communication strategy document
The level of detail or abstraction of the strategy must always be adapted to the size of the organisation. It is one thing to implement a communication strategy document by a marketing department of a dozen people in a large organisation, and another to do so in a unit where several people work and everyone deals with everything bit by bit.
In this case, it was particularly important to create a strategy based on detailed and simple examples, while describing the processes that simply have to happen.
Without revealing too much about SOS for Education’s activities, I can illustrate this with an example.
The target groups important to the organisation have been divided into circles. One of them, as you can easily guess, was teachers. We called them specialists. While defining their role in achieving the organisation’s main objective and describing how to communicate with them, I also had to give direct examples of the communication activities that should be carried out towards them, as well as the methods of profiling this group.
So the document itself was a mixture of strategy and examples of how to operationalise strategic objectives.
Communication strategy in practice
The whole process of working on the strategy took about three months. We had a lot of workshop meetings and got to know the organisation well. In the end, I produced two documents: a 10-page action plan for two months and a 30-page description of the strategy, target groups, communication channels, language and sample marketing activities.
When it came to implementing the activities described, the SOS for Education team approached us with a proposal for further cooperation and assistance in implementing my strategy.
From April 2023 to November 2023, we were responsible for
- Media relations and press monitoring;
- Managing social media;
- Writing newsletters;
- Microtargeting adverts
- Ordering and designing graphics;
- Organising press conferences;
- Analysing online activity;
- Building a new website.
Michał Szymanderski-Pastryk
