How good is your organisation at communicating with the people who matter? Do you have a set of clear communications objectives? How far are those objectives being met? How do you know? What difference would better communication make to your organisation’s ability to achieve its corporate goals?

Questions, questions. But the answers are just as vital to your future success as good financial control, manpower planning and the maintenance of quality standards for your service or product.

So have you thought about commissioning an independent communications audit that will examine whether you have the necessary systems in place to enable all parts and levels of your organisation to communicate effectively, both externally and internally?

We have extensive experience in carrying out communications audits. Each audit has to be tailored to the specific needs and circumstances of the client. Depending on the scale of the exercise and the scope of your brief to us, we might, for example:

• review the impact, effectiveness and cost-benefits of all your existing communications methods;

• undertake surveys of key target groups to find out how they rate your communications and how they would like to see them improved;

• map out an action plan for implementing recommendations arising from the audit;

• undertake training of managers and key staff to ensure they have the skills and confidence to make the necessary improvements.

We would normally expect an audit to be undertaken over a period of between four and eight weeks, with the findings reported within two weeks of completion. Our aim is to give you an honest and frank assessment of your current communications performance, together with a set of recommendations for practical, cost-effective ways of improving that performance and, importantly, for sustaining that improvement in the long-term.

The outcome of the audit should be to give you a realistic overview of what your organisation is already communicating well and where it is communicating badly. This information can then be used to develop a new strategy with clear goals and agreed methods for achieving those goals.

We were commissioned by a major public body with an existing communications strategy to pinpoint why the strategy did not seem to be working and what needed to be done to make it work. We organised a series of workshops with managers and lead professionals to stimulate their ideas (and therefore commitment to future action) on the best way forward. We asked them to think about:

• examples of good and bad communication they had experienced themselves as consumers or users of services provided by other organisations;

• what, for them, constitutes good and bad communication;

• how these lessons could be applied to their own organisation;

• where they felt their own organisation was communicating well or badly, and why;

• aspects of their own work that would benefit from improved communication with staff, service users, the media or other key stakeholders;

• simple ways in which the organisation could improve external and internal communication at little or no cost.

The outcome of these workshops was translated into a report for the board with 25 specific recommendations on practical steps that could be taken over the following twelve months to improve the impact of the organisation’s communications activity.