Strategy & Planning Work:
Strategy & Planning for More Focused Communication
Helping organizations decide what to say, who to reach, and how to focus their efforts
Most communication projects start with a clear intention. You know what you want to achieve, have an audience in mind, and an idea of how to reach them.
Strategy work is about testing whether those pieces connect and filling in the gaps when they don’t.
That might mean reconsidering the format, reframing the message, or rethinking how and where you intend to reach people. Sometimes the original plan holds up well. Sometimes a clearer direction means doing something different than what was first proposed.
Either way, the result is a plan that moves you toward your intended goal.
When This Kind of Support is Helpful
Strategy work tends to be useful when there’s a project or initiative on the table, but the details of how to execute it aren’t yet clear.
You might be in a situation like:
- You have a communications goal, but aren’t sure how best to reach the people you’re trying to connect with.
- You’re planning a specific project — a website, a campaign, a new program launch — and want to make sure the approach is sound before work begins.
- Communication efforts have felt scattered or reactive, and you want a clearer framework to work from.
- There’s internal disagreement about priorities or messaging, and you need a shared direction.
In each case, we start with understanding what you’re trying to achieve and work backward from there.
What This Work Focuses On
A good strategy helps connect the right message to the right audience in the right way. In practice, that means working through a few core questions:
These questions don’t always get answered in order, and the answers to one often reshape the others. That back-and-forth is where useful thinking happens.
Types of Strategy & Planning Work
Strategy work can take different forms depending on where you are in the process and what you need to figure out. It typically considers:
- Organizational alignment — ensuring communication goals and strategies reflect your organization’s purpose and priorities, so efforts are pointed in the right direction from the start.
- Communication strategies — setting overall direction for how communication is structured and delivered across your organization or initiative.
- Campaign and content planning — identifying the mix, sequence, and cadence of materials needed to work toward a specific goal.
- Messaging development — clarifying and refining key messages based on what you know about your audience and your relationship with them.
- Capacity and role development — identifying the skills, processes, tools, and resources needed to carry the strategy forward.
These often overlap. A messaging question can resurface an alignment question. A capacity conversation can reshape the whole plan. The work tends to move between these areas rather than through them in a straight line.
How This Work Typically Happens
Strategy work usually begins with a conversation about what you’re trying to achieve. If there’s already a project on the table, that conversation also explores how you see that project meeting your needs — which often surfaces assumptions worth examining before work begins.
From there, the focus shifts to the core strategic questions: who you’re trying to reach, where the overlap is between your offer and their needs, and what kind of relationship you’re starting from.
That thinking shapes a clear direction: priorities, messaging, approach, and whatever else the situation calls for. Options get discussed and refined with your capacity and resources in mind.
The work concludes with something you can use: a documented direction that’s clear enough to guide decisions and specific enough to be applied consistently.
How This Work Fits with Diagnostic and Content Work
Strategy work sometimes follows diagnostic work, building on a clear picture of what’s happening to decide what to do next. That sequence tends to produce the most focused results.
But strategy can also be the starting point. If you arrive with a project in mind and a clear sense of what you’re trying to achieve, diagnostic work may not be necessary — the early strategy conversation often surfaces what’s needed.
Either way, strategy provides the direction that makes subsequent content and design work more efficient and more likely to land. Without it, even well-executed materials can miss the mark.
What This Work is Not
Strategy work is about decision-making, not production. It doesn’t result in communication materials or a campaign; those come later, informed by the direction this work establishes.
It also isn’t about producing an elaborate plan that looks comprehensive but is difficult to apply. The measure of good strategy isn’t its length or complexity. It’s whether it helps you make better decisions and move forward with more confidence.
Examples of Content & Design Work
Recent examples of this kind of work:
These are starting points. The specifics depend on what you’re trying to achieve and what’s already in place.
