Hey Reader,

Each week in this newsletter I answer a question from a reader. This week's question comes from an internal comms manager in Boston who asks:

Hey, thanks for this question, this is a very common challenge and I firstly want to reassure you that getting budget for a new internal comms platform can be really tricky. Sometimes your leaders aren’t convinced it’s worth the spend, other times IT brush you off and tell you to use something else they already have a licence for, other times there IS a comms budget but it’s all poured into external comms and PR instead.

In today’s issue, let’s look at what you can do if you’re trying to get buy-in or budget for a new platform in your company. I’ll give you some tips to think about how to approach this and share some mistakes I’ve made in my own career so you can avoid them and make faster progress than I did.

Just last week I hosted an event on this topic in The Curious Tribe. I invited Peter Durkin, CMO at Blink, to come into the tribe and share his insights about how comms teams are getting the green light to invest in new comms technology. Peter and his team spend all day every day working with comms teams around the world to help them diagnose their business problems, write great business cases and get a big fat YES for investment. It’s a lot, right?

Let’s get stuck in... what are these comms teams doing that we could learn from?

Insight 1: You're not really buying a tool, you're selling change

Peter talked about the importance of how we approach asking for a budget or trying to get buy-in for a new platform, and his approach really struck me as so important.

“It’s not about the platform” he told us. “You’re not really buying a tool. You’re selling change”.

What this means for us, in practical terms, is that approaching IT and asking them to bring in a new platform is totally the wrong move. Writing to your CFO or budget holder asking for money for a new platform is starting in the wrong place.

[I’ve done both of those things, I can attest they do not work.]

We need to slow down, park the platform for now, and think about the problem we’re trying to solve instead. Why do we need the platform? What is the business problem, why does it matter, why should our leaders care, why do we need to make a change?

These are tougher, meatier, trickier questions but these are the ones that will get you the buy-in you need for the tool that you want. If you can align your suggested change to something your leaders already care about or a problem that the business needs solving, then you’re much closer to a yes.

And part of the slowing down is to bring our stakeholders along on the journey with us. It’s not helpful to go to IT demanding a new platform, they need to understand the problems you’re solving and the real business need. The platform ask comes last.

So before you ask anyone for anything, ask yourself first: Am I asking for a tool without making it clear why the business really needs it?

Insight 2: Show the cost of NOT changing

Often when we're excited about a change, in this case bringing in a shiny new piece of tech, we spend all our energy describing how much better things will be once we have it. We talk about the benefits of the platform, how it will help the company, how it will improve how we communicate.

But pointing to the benefits is only half the battle. Peter rightly pointed out that you also need to outline, clearly and as explicitly as you can, what happens if the business DOESN’T change. What is the cost of standing still and continuing to work as we currently are, for example continuing with an outdated clunky Sharepoint intranet that doesn’t work and that employees hate using?

How do you show the cost of doing nothing? Well you need to get very curious and very nosy and figure out what the current system is likely to be costing the business. For example, if your employees are currently spending 5 hours every week searching for information they can’t find easily because of your terrible intranet, then you can do a calculation based on the average salaries of how much this is costing each week / month / year. Or maybe your Sharepoint site is so difficult to manage that your company has to employ a Sharepoint developer just to keep the thing alive, this person’s salary is also part of the cost of inaction.

Your key tip here is to do some investigative journalism in your role before you go asking for money. What is it costing your company to continue as it is, and can you quantify that for your CFO?

Insight 3: You need a clear problem statement

And the third insight I want to leave you with is probably the most important and the one you can put into practice the fastest: you need to write a clear problem statement that outlines the business problem, why it matters and what it’s costing the company.

This is tricky because you’re going to write this in 2 – 3 sentences only. Not 2 – 3 pages or 2 – 3 slides, just a couple of short sentences that you can rattle off over and over when you’re explaining why the company needs to change and why you need this new platform investment.

For all of us working in comms, we know that putting together something so concise without losing the meaning or impact is difficult! It’s much easier to write a long document than it is to have something so short and direct. Who was it that famously said

“Sorry I wrote you such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one”

Writing a problem statement sounds simple, but I don’t think it is, I think it’s quite challenging and this is probably where most people get stuck or give up. It needs to be clear, it needs to be rooted in evidence and facts, it needs to be concise, it needs to be jargon free and easy to understand immediately. And you need to get it right, because the whole case for your platform investment gets built on top of this problem statement.

Here's how you can start creating your problem statement... try filling in the blanks in this sentence:

• Right now, (insert the problem) is costing the business (insert the costs in time/ money/ risk) and if we don't change this, (insert the consequence of not changing).

This is just the tip of the iceberg

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

• Step-by-step instructions on how to write a clear "problem statement" with examples and explanation
• A change equation formula you can use to check if your business case is strong enough before you present it to leaders or IT
• What stakeholders you need to get onside, and in what order you need their support, before you go near a platform vendor
• The story of the 14,000-person company that got a firm no from their finance director three times, and what they changed to finally get a yes
• How you can run "cost of inaction" interviews with employees to identify what the status quo is costing your business

And as a bonus, tribe members also get:

• A full business case template to help you get the buy-in and budget that you need, to put all of the tips above into practice

You can download this in the tribe today.

So if you're thinking of requesting budget for a new platform, you don't have to start from a blank page. You can take Peter’s approach and his full template, adapt it to your organisation and give yourself a huge head start.

This is exactly the kind of practical, been-there, real-life advice 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. 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?

Join the tribe now

We've got plenty more coming up in the tribe over the next few months, including:

• How to say no in work
• Sharing how we're using AI in our roles
• A case study in rolling out a new leadership programme
• A behind-the-scenes look at how Appspace run their townhalls

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 Peter on LinkedIn here, he’s sharp as a tack and really understands the nuances of getting buy-in for new tools and tech.

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

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