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Planning
Your Plan: Think of it as GPS for your company
Planning is at the core of any sound public relations program, and Carter-Harwell has emphasized its importance from the beginning.
Our approach to planning draws from such diverse disciplines as traditional public relations planning, issues management, stakeholder management, business market planning, and communications theory.
Why use Carter-Harwell for your communications planning?
- Results. Our planning processes are designed to avoid the two most common planning traps: (1) high costs, and (2) excessive development time. Our fundamentally sound, practical approach gives you a solid plan you can work with and build on for years to come.
- Experience. Carl Carter, APR, has spent more than 34 years in the fields of journalism and communications and has built plans for a wide variety of clients in fields as diverse as health care, higher education, telecommunications, and banking. He is accredited by the Public Relations Society of America.
- Availability of related services. Once your plan is ready, we can help you carry it out, with a full range of Production Services, including brochures, newsletters, speeches, graphic design, and a wide variety of others.
How it works - a typical example
Your team is intimately involved in all phases of the planning. We facilitate, advise and guide, but it's your plan. Here are some activities that commonly go into the development of a corporate communications plan:
- Review of the task at hand and the process to be used.
- Review of the firm's strategic goals.
- Preliminary selection of which goals may be readily supported through an improved communications program.
- Development of a stakeholder map.
- Identification of issues related to each vital stakeholder group.
- Identification of desired and actual behaviors of key stakeholders. Depending on the needs, we use a variety of other tools, including behavioral analysis, force field analysis, and others.
- Goals in support of the firm's strategic business goals and other identified needs.
- Strategies for each goal that outline the elements of the program to be undertaken.
- Objectives for each strategy. These are as specific, measurable and objective as possible, stressing outcomes and behavior rather than activities.
- Tactics for carrying out each strategy and accomplishing the objectives. These are specific steps and action items with timelines and assignments of responsibility where appropriate.
How do we get these results? By using state-of-the-art tools, an unsurpassed knowledge of the world of media, and hard work. We will identify the key journalists in your industry and work with you to develop a state-of-the-art program that will give you use today's media to get more customers and leverage your marketing budget.