A Strategic Communication Audit Is Not a Style Guide Review

Confused about communication audits and style guide reviews? Here’s the key difference: A communication audit evaluates how well your organisation's communication aligns with its goals and engages stakeholders. A style guide review ensures consistency in language, formatting, and branding but doesn’t measure strategic effectiveness.

Key Points:

• Communication Audit: Focuses on the effectiveness of messages, channels, and stakeholder engagement. It identifies gaps and aligns communication with business goals.
• Style Guide Review: Ensures uniformity in tone, language, and visual branding but doesn’t assess communication outcomes.

Quick Comparison:

Bottom Line: Communication audits are about measuring impact and improving strategies, while style guides are about maintaining brand consistency. Both are important, but they serve completely different purposes.

Why You Need to do a Communications Audit

Main Parts of a Communication Audit

A communication audit involves three main components that assess how effectively your organisation delivers its messages. Together, these elements provide a clear picture of how well your communication efforts are working.

Communication Channel Review

This step looks at how effectively your organisation uses its communication channels, including both digital and printed formats. It evaluates recent corporate communications from departments such as human resources, IT, and facilities management.

A detailed review helps identify:

• How well messages are distributed across platforms
• How accessible and frequently used each channel is
• Whether the content format suits its purpose
• Any bottlenecks in the flow of information

Message and Goal Alignment

This part examines whether your communications align with your organisation's objectives. As the Forbes Communications Council explains:

"An audit ensures that your messaging, channels, and stakeholder engagement align well with your evolving business goals. It helps maintain a synergy between what the business aims to achieve and how it communicates these objectives to the internal team and external world."

Key areas of focus include:

• Whether communications support strategic goals
• Reinforcement of brand values
• Consistency across all departments
• Clarity in conveying leadership's vision

Audience Response Analysis

Evaluating how your audience receives and reacts to your communications is crucial. This involves using both quantitative and qualitative methods to gather insights.

Common methods include:

• Anonymous surveys
• Focus groups
• One-on-one interviews with key stakeholders
• Analysing engagement metrics

"To gain a deeper understanding of communication effectiveness, gather feedback directly from your audiences. Use surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one interviews to obtain qualitative insights into how well messages are received and understood".

When designing surveys, aim for completion times of 1-15 minutes. Keeping them concise encourages higher response rates while maintaining the quality of the data collected.

4 Steps to Complete a Communication Audit

When reviewing communication channels and audience feedback, a focused audit process can help you evaluate your messaging strategies and their impact on your organisation. These four steps will guide you through the process and provide actionable insights.

1. Set Clear Audit Goals

Start by defining specific objectives that align with your organisation's overall strategy. Use the SMART framework - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound - to shape your goals.

Here’s what to keep in mind:

• Align goals with your organisation’s mission.
• Define clear Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
• Get senior management support to secure necessary resources.
• Set realistic deadlines for completing the audit.

2. Gather and Review Data

Collect both qualitative and quantitative data to ensure a thorough audit.

When collecting data, focus on:

• Hosting leader listening sessions to evaluate communication effectiveness.
• Conducting employee focus groups to gather diverse perspectives.
• Analysing channel metrics and reviewing communication workflows.

Once the data is collected, compare the insights with your strategic objectives.

3. Connect Results to Business Goals

To make your audit impactful, tie the findings directly to your organisation’s goals.

1. Perform a SWOT analysis
   Identify your communication strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to pinpoint areas needing improvement.
2. Develop an Action Plan
   Create a detailed plan that balances quick wins with long-term initiatives. Focus on changes that directly advance your organisation’s objectives.
3. Establish Monitoring Systems
   Implement systems to regularly track progress and measure the outcomes of your changes. This ensures continuous improvement and allows for timely adjustments.

One example of this approach in action is Fairmont Schools. They identified weaknesses in their operations through team surveys and interviews. By introducing a project management system with consistent templates, they improved their communication processes and strengthened their market position.

This structured process ensures that audit results lead to meaningful, goal-oriented improvements.

Style Guides vs Communication Audits

Style guides focus on maintaining consistency, while audits evaluate the effectiveness of communication strategies.

Style Guides Focus on Format

Style guides are all about keeping a brand's look and feel consistent. They standardise formatting and language, ensuring everything from visuals to tone aligns with the brand's identity. Here's how they work:

Audits Measure Results

Unlike style guides, communication audits focus on outcomes. They go beyond appearances to evaluate whether messages achieve their intended goals.

For instance, audits can pinpoint gaps in communication, assess how well channels perform, measure engagement levels, and ensure messages align with business objectives. This is especially critical when employees feel disconnected from company updates.

"A thorough communications audit is the safest route to find a clear answer to that question. It's the best way to highlight strengths, uncover glaring weaknesses and reshape your content strategy."

• Vicky Zeldin, chief strategist for Magnetic Manager

Take IDP as an example. This education services provider conducted a detailed communication audit, uncovering major shortcomings in their internal messaging. Instead of just adhering to style rules, they used data to refine their strategy, boosting both communication effectiveness and employee engagement.

While style guides and audits serve different purposes, audits uniquely assess the strategic impact of communication efforts:

Conclusion

Understanding the difference between communication audits and style guides is essential for organisational success. Research shows that many employees often miss critical company updates, underscoring the importance of evaluating communication methods.

Here’s a quick comparison of these tools:

Industry professionals back this up. The Forbes Communications Council states: "An audit ensures that your messaging, channels, and stakeholder engagement align well with your evolving business goals".

FAQs

How does a communication audit help align an organisation's messaging with its strategic goals?

A communication audit evaluates how well your organisation's messaging, communication channels, and stakeholder engagement align with its strategic objectives. By identifying gaps, redundancies, or inconsistencies, the audit ensures that your communications effectively support your goals.

This process provides actionable insights to refine messaging, improve audience engagement, and ensure that internal and external communications clearly reflect the organisation's mission and priorities. Ultimately, it helps create a cohesive strategy that resonates with stakeholders and drives organisational success.

What are the key steps for conducting an effective communication audit?

To conduct an effective communication audit, start by defining its scope. Identify the audiences, teams, and communication methods you want to assess. Next, review recent communications - gather samples from the past 6 to 12 months and evaluate them for alignment with your organisation’s goals, brand, and messaging quality.

Engage your audience by gathering feedback through surveys, focus groups, or interviews to understand how well your messages resonate. Use this data to perform a SWOT analysis, identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in your communication strategy. Finally, develop a clear action plan with realistic goals and milestones to improve future communications. Keeping the process structured and focused ensures meaningful results tailored to your organisation's needs.

How can stakeholder feedback be used to improve communication strategies during a communication audit?

Stakeholder feedback is invaluable for refining communication strategies during a communication audit. By gathering input from key groups - such as employees, customers, or partners - organisations can gain a clear understanding of how well their messaging resonates and identifies areas for improvement.

This feedback can be collected through surveys, interviews, or focus groups, offering insights into the effectiveness of communication channels, message clarity, and audience engagement. Analysing this input helps identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for alignment with organisational goals, enabling tailored recommendations that drive meaningful improvements.

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• What a Communication Review Really Reveals (That No One Wants to Admit)
• You’re Not Communicating Strategically - You’re Just Broadcasting
• The 5 Questions Every Effective Communication Audit Should Answer