Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week's question comes from a Head of Internal Comms in Belgium who asks:

First of all, congrats on the new gig. I love the excitement of going into a new organisation with fresh eyes and spotting the glaring issues that everyone else has become blind to. You've already done that by spotting the issues with the comms channels, so hats off to you.

Problems with comms channels are surprisingly common. Often what happens in organisations is that channels will slowly multiply and bloat over time, with no one to say "hang on, we don't need this many" or "we have 3 different channels serving the same purpose for the same audience, this is silly". Fixing the channels and getting a good comms infrastructure in place is a really solid foundational piece of work that will set you up for success in this role.

Now on to your question. Can you audit your comms channels yourself, on top of the day job? Yes, you can (although I'm sure other consultants would tell you different). It is hard work and you need persistence and patience but yes absolutely you can do this yourself. In some ways, it's arguably more valuable to do it yourself as you are fully immersed in the work, you understand the nuance and the insights in-depth and you can stand over all your recommendations and planned actions with confidence as you built them yourself.

Let's see how it's done

Your timing for this question is great as we recently discussed this in a live event in The Curious Tribe. Our own tribe member Gary McLaughlin (who has been in the tribe for 3 years, btw!) shared a candid, behind-the-scenes look at how he did his own DIY channel audit last year with great results.

He also had no budget to hire external help and he decided to give it a go himself. He did the whole audit, start to finish, with the support of the tribe – including running an employee survey, holding multiple focus groups, doing all the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data, making recommendations and presenting those recommendations to leaders.

PHEW! Shall we have a look at how he did it?

Insight 1: Get your leaders on board

If you want to invest a lot of your time, energy and attention into this audit, you'll need buy-in from your boss and your leaders to do this. They need to understand that it's important and why it matters to the business.

When Gary first mentioned doing a "channel audit" to his leaders, he realised he was speaking the wrong language. "Comms audit" is really comms jargon, isn't it? It means nothing to someone outside of our profession. So Gary cleverly switched gears and began talking about the audit differently. He framed the project as the solution to an operational problem; the business wasn't operating efficiently due to the high volume of channels and the confusion over which channels served which purpose. This was causing a loss of productivity, wasted employee time, duplicated effort and widespread confusion. He successfully framed the need for a comms audit around saving the company money, and he got the go-ahead to do it.

So think about this for your company. How would you frame your comms audit to your leader? Who would you need to convince, and what would they respond to best?

Insight 2: Look at numbers AND feelings

Here's a principle that runs through everything Gary did: a good audit needs both the hard data and the human story behind it. One without the other will let you down.

The quantitative side, things like a survey, tells you what is happening. How many channels you actually have, how many people use each one, how many are frustrated or satisfied. It gives you scale and hard numbers you can put in front of a leader. But numbers alone will never tell you why. Why do people feel frustrated? Why do they prefer one channel over another? What would actually make their working lives easier? For that you need the qualitative side, the honest, in-their-own-words feeling behind the data.

Gary got his numbers from an employee survey and his "why" from focus groups, and it was combining the two that gave him such a deep, credible understanding of what was really going on. So as you plan your own audit, don't reach for just one method. Make sure you've got a way to capture both the what and the why, because that's what turns a pile of data into a story your leaders can't argue with.

Insight 3: Know that the audit is actually the easy part

This is the one I really want you to take away, because it surprised even Gary. Going in, he assumed the hard work would be the audit itself, all that gathering and analysing. Looking back, he says that was the easy part. The genuinely difficult bit comes afterwards: getting people to actually change how they work.

Because people revert to habits. You can put shiny new systems and protocols in place, but the moment you get complacent, old behaviours creep straight in. So don't think of your audit as a project with a tidy end date and a finish line. The recommendations are really the start of a longer piece of work, a change programme, not a one-and-done clean-up. Go in with your eyes open to that, Gary suggests, and you won't be blindsided at the end of the audit.

This is just the tip of the iceberg

What I've shared here is just the tip of the iceberg of what you can learn in Gary's session. The whole thing is recorded and available for playback in The Curious Tribe video library, available exclusively to members. In the full recording you'll also learn:

• The full step-by-step methodology Gary followed, from desk review right through to presenting to leaders: what he did at each step, how he did it and why
• How he approached the focus groups, and the facilitation techniques he picked up along the way (including how to get a silent room talking)
• Why he recommends including open-ended questions in your survey, despite the mountain of comments they create, and what he learned from them
• How he turned all that messy quantitative and qualitative data into a clear, compelling set of recommendations
• What genuinely surprised him in the findings
• The full story of what he's done since, and how he's tackling that tricky behaviour-change piece
• What he'd do differently if he was starting all over again

And because Gary is a legend, he hasn't just shared the full story of what he did and how he did it. He's also shared:

• The complete set of survey questions he used
• Every question he asked in his focus groups

You can download these in The Curious Tribe.

So if you're thinking of doing a DIY comms channel audit, you don't have to start from a blank page. You can take Gary's approach, adapt it to your organisation and give yourself an enormous head start.

This is exactly the kind of practical, been-there case study that's hard to find anywhere else. And this is what we share in The Curious Tribe.

The Curious Tribe is a global community of internal comms professionals who share their real work; the wins, the challenges, the lessons, the way Gary did here. Members love the community... the tribe has an NPS of +81 and 90% of members renew year after year. People join and they stay.

Want to join us?

We've got loads more events coming up in the tribe over the coming months including:

• Getting buy-in and budget for a new platform
• How to say no in work
• Sharing how we each run our townhalls
• How to use events & print to drive engagement with frontline employees
• A masterclass in shooting video content on your smartphone

If you work in internal comms, The Curious Tribe was built for you. Are you the next member of The Curious Tribe?

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

PS You can find Gary on LinkedIn here, he's smart and ambitious and really bloody good at his job. I highly recommend connecting with him.

Find me on YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and check out my book​

Want to work together?

• Join The Curious Tribe. This is my membership community for ambitious, curious communicators who want to achieve more in their roles and have fun at the same time. Membership allows you to work directly with me for 12 months, make deep connections with other communication pros who 'get it' and improve your skills through training and learning. More info here.
• Ready to review your channels and content but don't know where to start? Download my practical Internal Comms Audit Playbook to guide you through a DIY audit - no expensive consultant needed.​ This has ready-to-use templates and checklists to give you a systematic way to do your own audit which you can repeat every single year. Get it here.
• Take a shortcut. I've developed a collection of tried-and-tested templates, checklists and how-to guides for the key processes you'll need in your role as an internal communicator. You can download my Internal Comms Cheat Sheets here.​

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