The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Eight Steps to Effective Strategic Communication | S4Ep9

Episode Date: January 11, 2025

On today’s Framework Friday, Eight Steps to Effective Strategic Communication, I’m going to share the National Incident Management System (NIMS) 8-step process that many Public Information Officers (PIO) use to effectively communicate before, during, and after disasters.Reference: page 20 of the National Incident Management System (NIMS) Basic Guidance for Public Information Officers (PIOs)

I've seen good communication processes used by my former incident management team teammates, and I and many of you have more recently seen little to no process being used to brief the public after the impact of a man-made attack and now natural disaster like the California wildfires. On today's Framework Friday, Eight Steps to Effective Strategic Communication, I'm going to share the National Incident Management System, or NIMS, 8-step process that many of the public information officers that I worked with used for effective strategic and tactical communication before, during, and after disasters. But first, please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and let's get started with the People Process Progress Podcast. Thank you everybody for coming back to the People Process Progress Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Pinnell. You can read more about this episode, previous

episodes, and contact me at peopleprocessprogress.com. Now let's get into these eight steps. The first thing you want to do, whether you're being strategic and planning a campaign or you need to get a message out quickly to folks, is to assess the current situation. That's just good for the public safety folks. They'll call this a size up. For public project managers, they'll call this like a project intake or a business case. At any rate, you need to see what's happening, to whom it's happening, and what should the audience do that you're talking to, right? You don't want to just say, this is happening, this is where it's happening, and then not give actions for people. So assess the current situation is the first step. The second thing we want to do

is set communication goals, which is what NIMS uses. I like objectives, which is really what they're talking about. Smart objectives, right? They're specific, they're measurable, they're achievable, they're realistic, they're time-based. And let's talk about during an emergency, I wanna provide awareness of the situation to all residents in whatever times a day throughout the duration of the emergency, right?

So I'm gonna make sure that we tell folks three times a day, we're gonna give them briefings, whatever's happening. For a non-emergency, you could say, especially if you're say website focus, I want to increase the number of unique visitors on our website by x percent by y date, right? So it's I want to do something by a certain time by this you can also do as I've talked about in here. And if you're agile, user story, but essentially, you want to have an objective that you're meeting. So you one you're assessing to saying, Okay, what's the objective that we need to meet with this communication, whether it's an immediate or strategic thing?

Third, identify the audience, right? Is this for everyone in the state? Is it for folks just in a certain area? So if you look back at the New Orleans situation, it wasn't the entire state of Louisiana. Sure, there was probably some concern and panic across America. ISIS is here, all these things, right? kind of like after 11 other stuff, but really,

the direct threat was down in near Bourbon Street in that area. So that's what they closed off. And that's what they focused on. So is it whole city is a neighborhood if there's other issues going on. So we've assessed, we've set these communication objectives, we've identified who the audience is, and that's who we're going to talk to, Then we need to develop and, which is key, pre-test our messages, right? Reach out to your colleagues, your other public information officers, your leadership. Hey, I put this together. Does this seem right to you? That's very helpful because you're going to be so close to the drafts of these messages. You need someone else to look at it or help provide another filter. The other thing is you want to evaluate how informative they are, how persuasive this is,

if you want people to take action, how effective the message is on someone that's not you writing the message, how direct it is, right? Because we don't want to use vague information or beat around the bush, and how concise this is. And this is where this direct part and the concise part, the direct part really, I talked about in the effort in the previous episode on how not to brief during a disaster. We can't tell everything in public safety because some of that stuff is law enforcement sensitive. So we want to be direct though. There's a threat from people in this area or there's a fire spreading in these areas, that kind of stuff without giving away the secret sauce, the law enforcement sensitive stuff. So again, we've assessed,

we've set objectives, we've identified the audiences, we were developing and pre testing messages, and you can have pre can messages as well. So we're going to our colleagues look at it, other folks, other PIOs. The fifth thing we're going to do is select the channels and the activities, which means what are we going to use to get this message out, right? Are we going to push an alerting system message? Are we going to send email? Does that alerting system automatically send email and text? Are we going to use like messaging like Teams or something if it's internal?

We're going to hold a press conference where we stand up in front of people in an organized way like we talked about in the last one. We're going to use social media, which a lot of folks do, and that's very effective. We're going to get on the radio because not everybody has a computer in the internet, even 2025. Not everybody has a smartphone that they're checking things on, though. Many people do. We also get to think about what does almost everyone have access to regular TV, some people I still use an antenna, it gets a great HD signal and a radio, right? Some folks still listen to the radio, and that's maybe their primary means even in this day and age. And you have to consider that you have to really consider your modality. So even if you do this for a project, what do people really

use more? Do they read email more? Do they respond to teams messages or other messaging? Do they respond to direct text message, phone calls, those kind of things, you got to figure it out and you got to know your audience. The sixth thing is we're going to develop an action plan. This is where being able to put together a very direct but concise plan helps. We're going to include where we're going to send this message, how, and who's going to do it and who owns it. This is almost exactly the same thing as the communication plan for project management. You can do this on a table, meaning an Excel spreadsheet or a table in Word or whatever, where it's what's the message,

who's going to send it, when are we going to send it, how are we going to send it, and how often and this just go down the list of those plan that out of strategic, you can also do this for a very quick on a whiteboard, right? If you're in the back of an SUV, or you're out, you're out in the big wilderness where the wildfires are and they have a command post and you're the PIO and you're putting those messages together.

The seventh step of this eight step process is we want to develop and pre-test material. So the first thing we did was develop and pre-test messages. Now we're going to develop and pre-test material. So that means we're going to make mock-up interviews and kind of practice, have formal discussions, informal polls, feedback. So those are more for the strategic thing,

right? For doing a campaign. For the emergent stuff, we're going to look at, hey, these flyers we have to get out, this post on social media, how do these look? Is it accurate? Because we can make images and do things super fast. Communications experts that marketing folks that are typically or often should be their public information officer that craft the message, again, that's for the message going out and managing the media, can knock this stuff out really quickly. But we do want to, like we talked about before, get other eyes on it, take a look at it, make sure it's accurate. But we want to pre-test them. Hey, does this look right? If you were a person that, you know, is not in this business of emergencies, could you understand this very quickly, know where to go, take whatever action we want you to do, that kind of stuff.

And the eighth thing is to implement it, to evaluate and modify the plan, right? So we talked about having the good plan. Now we got to do it. Now we got to take action. So in other words, be agile though, and adjust what you're doing to the challenging and changing situation. Right? So don't just say, well, this was our plan, we can't change it. Because that's not the reality of how the world works. As soon as you make a plan, whether it's for an incident, a planned event, a project, a program, a product, as soon as it's made, it's going to be out of date, because something has changed, a person's change, a timeline change, money's change, who knows someone's perception of what we're actually doing has changed. A person's changed, a timeline's changed, money's changed. Who knows?

Someone's perception of what we're actually doing has changed. So certainly make the plan, have the framework, stick with it, but be open and dynamic to adjust to the needs of the people that you're doing this for. So if you're a public information officer or you're someone tasked with doing that, with sending a message because you don't have a PIO, you don't have that extra staff, so you're wearing three hats.

Don't wait for a crisis to strike. Start implementing these planning steps today. Assess where you are, your current situation. Set up those smart objectives. Identify your key audience. Develop your test messages. Choose the right channels to put the message on, create an action plan, and then most importantly, be agile and adapt as needed.

To all of you that are acting as public information officers out there in some capacity, whether it's a big incident, event, a project, a program, an organization, or you're acting in that role, you've got this. Keep it simple, follow the steps. Communicate effectively. Thank you all for listening to this eight steps to effective strategic communication. You can follow the show and me on X and Instagram at Penel, P-A-N-E-L-L-K-G. You can go to the People Process Progress YouTube channel where you get fitness, cold plunge, jujitsu, after action reports about 15 seconds at a time. And you can follow me on LinkedIn or contact me via the peopleprocessprogress.com website. There's a contact form there. Until next time, let your hope ignite your will

to keep doing well, to keep communicating well with others. The plans you develop guide you and your teams and the actions that you'll take to execute those plans transform you and the world around you. Stay safe, everybody, and Godspeed.