Introduction
A marketing communication’s strategy includes a message, medium, and target. The message is the goal of RMRRU—ensuring the safety and national security of the Kingdom. The medium of communication in the modern world should involve digital sources—RMRRU’s social media, messengers, and emails. The target of this communications plan is the employees of RMRRU, everyone who is responsible for building the Kingdom’s resilience and ability to respond to challenges. This marketing communications strategy aims to help the staff of RMRRU to understand the purpose of the organization and outline the practices that RMRRU’s communications experts will use to disseminate information within the organization.
Two Way Engagement
This communications plan’s primary goal is to ensure that RMRRU has a two-way engagement plan that allows the management to deliver messages to the employees and vice versa. The best practice for establishing two communication is to adopt the cascade or waterfall communications strategy. The goal is to ensure that this two-way communication is an integral part of RMRRU’s culture. The top officials of RMRRU have to lead by their example to make waterfall communication an essential part of operations.
Under the cascade communication strategy, the communication begins with the CEO and the upper managers responsible for communicating the strategy and disseminating information. A similar approach should be adopted by the heads of departments on the regional level. For example, the CEO should address the changes in RMRRU’s strategy and announce strategic projects for the following years. Leaders at one level communicate with leadership at the other, creating a flow of information from the top level to the bottom. For this, RMRUU should leverage web communications technologies, including emails and broadcasting services for internal briefings. Thus, by integrating the waterfall communications strategy, RMRUU will create a cohesive communications system in all provinces.
Active Listening to Responses and Feedback
Apart from conveying messages, the two-way communication approach also implies the need to establish active listening mechanisms. The best active listening practice is to encourage the employees to share and the management to take time to listen to their messages. To achieve this, this management at different levels should be instructed about active listening practices and provided with briefs on how to engage employees in two-way communication. The open-door policy facilitates two-way communication, and it can be achieved by encouraging employees to voice their concerns to the managers proactively. Again, this practice should begin with the CEO disseminating the message that RMRUU aims to create a welcoming environment for internal communications.
Briefing the Staff
Next, to ensure that all staff members are fully briefed on RMRRU’s mission, vision, and purpose, the communications team will create briefs and information sheets distributed to all staff members. Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, it is best to hold an online briefing and distribute the materials via email. The chief officer should hold the briefing at RMRUU, and the materials should answer the critical questions that the employees may have, illustrate the mission and vision of the organization, as well as some strategic targets for the following years. By assessing the number of people who viewed the briefing and opened these emails, the communications team will determine what percentage of staff members are briefed. Next, the managers at local levels should follow the chief executive’s example and inform their employees as well. Finally, to ensure that the staff understands how their work contributes to the community’s safety, RMRUU can run a campaign about its workers’ daily activities and how they help save the citizens from danger.
Tailored Engagement Strategies
To ensure that all staff is informed about RMRUU’s mission and activities, it is essential to assess the communication channel that most employees currently use and apply it to the new strategy. For specific responder groups, RMRUU should apply tailored engagement strategies. Responders are the individuals who arrive at the scene first, and they are often subjected to danger. Hence, it is vital to ensure that their contribution to the Kingdom’s safety is acknowledged in the distributed materials, for example, by interviewing local responders and encouraging them to share their experiences.
Regular Newsletter
The best practice for designing and delivering regular newsletters and other collateral is by creating a plan and a schedule. The newsletter should communicate the contribution of the RMRUU’s staff to their communities, which will require the communications specialist to collaborate with the responders. A schedule and a content plan for a month will help deliver the newsletter regularly.
Responder Events
The best practice for supporting the design and running of staff and responder events is by creating a design code for these events and planning the budget for such events. This should be done at local levels, and the management should assess the number of potential events and the required funding for them. By using the design code, each event will support the brand of RMRUU.
Measuring Success
Next, to assess the success of the internal communications strategy, several metrics were set. One metric is the social shares-the number of times that a particular message was reshared on social media. For internal communications, the amount of reshares on LinkedIn, a professional network that connects employees, is an appropriate benchmark to assess how effectively RMRRU can share its message. At the current state, having more than 100 reshares on posts is the benchmark.
Next, engagement metrics will help define how well RMRUU’s professionals connect with the message that the organization communicates. Finally, having feedback channels is essential to assess the effectiveness and satisfaction with the communication strategy. For this, a survey encompassing questions about the contents, interest, and potential ways of improvement should be distributed to the employees regularly, for example, every three months.
Best Practices
The best practice for supporting the design staff and responder events is to ensure that the employees are notified and track their engagement. Moreover, it is best to use the 4P’s of marketing to design an appropriate communications strategy, the product, price, place, and promotion, with an omission of the price element. The product, in this case, is the message of RMRUU—the organization’s mission to care for the citizen’s safety, and the place is the online briefings and corporate emails. The channels for communications include internal emails of RMRUU. Through these emails, the staff will be notified about the events, and afterward, the communications specialists will assess the satisfaction and thoughts of the team about these events.
The best practice for ensuring that the identified lessons are adopted is benchmarking, which means setting a specific goal and measuring the alignment of the actual communications with this goal. For example, for the internal communications at RMRUU in 2021, there should be 20 events, and 100 emails communicating the main goals of the organization, and these data should be compared to the actual number of emails.
Best practices in similar organizations will be reviewed using the United Kingdom’s national resilience services. The United Kingdom’s government’s marketing communication organization created a brief for the local resilience and response teams, including the main events, and communication goals. For example, the organization will host a workshop, briefing its employees about its current plans, responding to questions, and providing additional materials. In addition, the brief includes a set of standards for communication materials that support the agency’s role. To promote the RMRUU’s brand to the internal staff, all materials distributed by the organization have to include RMRUU’s logo and be written following the set format. In summary, this marketing communications plan establishes the basis for RMRUU’s communicating its purpose and mission to the staff.
External Communications
The external communication strategy is tailored toward the general public—to inform the citizens about RMRUU’s work, and the plans for the future and to provide information in case of a safety hazard. The best way to communicate with the public is through RMRUU’s press office and via web resources. The former will be in charge of press conferences and media briefings and will be in contact with the media. The second department will manage online communications—the RMRUU’s posts on the agency’s website, blog, and social media. This communications plan targets RMRUU’s strategy to communicate with the general public of the Kingdom and ways to benchmark its performance.
Public Communications
The goal of the public communications strategy is to promote RMRUU’s brand, image, and key messages to businesses, communities, and the public. For example, RMRUU can communicate the steps that the Kingdom’s citizens can take to enhance their safety and resilience through public awareness campaigns. This should be done through RMRUU’s resources, such as its website, blog, and social media, and by engaging news outlets. Additionally, holding regular monthly briefings for the public, where the chief executive reports about the success of the organization and the work that has been done in a month, is a key to supporting RMRUU’s public image.
Public Attitudes and Behavior
To manage the public’s attitudes and behaviors, RMRUU can begin campaigns that promote the safety of the citizens. Advertisements can affect people’s perceptions and their behavior, by the attitude change theory and dual processing model. Moreover, following the theory of social influences, RMRUU will benefit from engaging public figures and well-known individuals in its campaigns. For example, using social media influencers is a well-accepted method for raising brand awareness and advertising, and in the case of RMRUU, these individuals can provide a platform for communicating a public safety message.
Best Practices for Operations Plan
The best practice for creating, implementing, and evaluating a plan that can deliver RMRUU’s message across all platforms is a unified strategic communications framework distributed to the management at all levels. This communication framework should include the core principles of the organization, such as delivering information about public safety efficiently, communicating clearly, and maintaining a two-way communication channel with the public. Additionally, it is best to ensure that RMRUU’s communication with the media is managed through a single source—the public communications office, which will maintain RMRUU’s public image and brand. Additionally, this will help create and communicate a unified message about RMUU’s activities. The public relations office will be responsible for implementing the strategic framework and evaluating its success via benchmarking.
Best Practices for Website Management
RMRUU’s website is one of two channels for communicating with the public and media, which is why its maintenance and regular updates are essential. To ensure that the information on RMRUU’s website is relevant, the employee responsible for this communication channel has to prepare content plans monthly. These plans will include the specifics about the type of content, including informing the public about RMRUU’s press conferences or public safety campaigns, the medium, such as text, video, or photos, and the time when this content will be uploaded to the website.
To analyze the usage of the content on social media, RMRUU should evaluate the statistics, including website visits, the number of comments under articles, and shares on social media. For social media content, the number of followers, reposts, likes, and comments under a post help understand whether the message was delivered successfully. By analyzing the content’s usage, RMRUU’s public communications staff will be able to determine the topics that are of utmost interest to the general public and develop more content on similar topics.
Measuring Success and Adopting the Lessons
The best practice for measuring the success of this public communications strategy is benchmarking. For social media campaigns, engagement, reach, and volume are the core metrics. Engagement is when users like, comment, or share a particular social media post, which indicates that they have seen it or engaged with this content in a certain way. Reach is the total number of views, which is a metic available on platforms such as Instagram or Youtube and allows determining how many people saw the post. The volume is the total number of posts per campaign. For example, for one public safety campaign that lasts for three months, RMRUU should post 15 times, and this metric should be compared to the actual number of posts. To ensure that these lessons are adopted, the top management of RMRUU, following the waterfall communications strategy, should communicate the importance of maintaining a connection with the Kingdom’s public and incentivize the employees to share their ideas and opinions with the public communications. By emphasizing the importance of
Benchmarks in Similar Organizations
An excellent example of public communications is the Office of Homeland Security in the United States. This public organization has an Office of Public Affairs responsible for the media coverage and dissemination of information to the public. Moreover, this agency is a leading information center for US citizens in case of a national emergency or a disaster. Hence, the first benchmark for RMRUU is to establish two separate divisions within the public communications office for communications with the public—web communications and press office.
Next, the budget for the campaigns from the plan should be compared to the benefit that communicating the message provides. Since RMRUU is a governmental organization, calculating the ROI from the campaign is not an option, but there is a need for a metric that will allow determine the success of the campaign. The total number of people who saw RMRUU’s message as an accumulative metric from all online communications channels and the estimations for the number of people who saw the press briefings and read information from media resources will be compared to the campaign’s budget.
