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• STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS
• Introduction
• Audiences
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• Strategy
• Plan

A clear mission that drives your external strategy, needs to be developed. Essentially this will be your ‘guiding light’ that drives the delivery of your messages to external audiences, in a committed and passionate manner. The mission will identify the opportunities that you need to address, what you are doing to address them and what your principles and beliefs are. It will also include what your vision is for the future.

The strategy will identify from your audiences which people or organisations have an interest in our activities (positive or negative), as these are the people who will most likely want to listen to us. This concept in not new – masonry has targeted local charities, as they clearly needed our money. Whether they support us with positive marketing and whether we capitalise on the giving ‘event’, is an entirely different matter. Identifying target audiences is one thing, but we also need to learn about them in order to achieve success in our communication endeavours. For example, communicating with the person with the power to influence decisions within an editorial team, may be far more important than communicating with the reporter.

Thousands may read the the local Newspaper but most may not have any interest in the masonic message being communicated, particularly if, for example, it is being aimed at recruitment. Where the article appears in the paper may also have impact – our audience may only read the business and sport pages. A similar article in a specialist magazine may have a smaller audience but far more interested parties. In selecting target audiences we need to consider various factors:

Activities: work, hobbies, social activities, club membership, community involvement

Interests: family, hope, job, fashion, food, media, achievements

Opinions: social issues, politics, religion, beliefs, business, economic, education, culture, charity

Demographic: age, income, occupation, family, geographic, stage of life

EXTERNAL MESSAGES

Our overriding message needs to communicate why Freemasonry is important to society and what it can achieve for an individual or family. These messages must be coherent with the target audience’s values and offer them a route to finding out more. All communications need to contain some element(s) of our masonic principles.  We are often treading into territory where we have no clout to demand support, but are offering with openness some insight into our organisation.

To THE PLAN