Can any organisation make a meaningful impact without being seen or heard?
Let’s approach these issues by stating that while events can also be an essential tool for communication, a visibility plan can be applied to an event of immense importance. A visibility plan is simply all activities put together and carried out to achieve the visibility objectives. Its main focus is to create awareness among a selected group of people that shall be chosen.
From this simple description, one thing is very obvious and that is the fact that no successful visibility plan can be achieved without a well thought out visibility objective. The Visibility objectives specifically state the boundaries and the specifics that the plan and processes must achieve at a reasonable time. It also has to be measurable so as to score efforts for a certain period of the project.
There are several areas that could be considered when designing a visibility plan, but three areas really stand out; the audiences, the visibility tools or the channels and then the message.
Your audience
The audience is the single most important aspect of the plan. No wise strategist will plan to communicate with everybody in the world, even, in the nearest community to you. That is why there is a need to painstakingly distil your audience from a whole pack, this process is referred to as audience segmentation. The next question will be, why should I choose these ones? What qualifies them as my audiences? Who needs it? This is determined by your project area or what your organisation is called and empowered to deliver.
When this is done, it gives you a clearer picture of the people you are dealing with and what it will take to reach out to them wherever or however they may be. Once your audiences have been segmented a major aspect of your plan has been dealt with.
Your Message
This is another crucial part of the plan that must be taken seriously if the plan will be successful. The message is the core of the plan. This is what will be deliberately encoded and disseminated to the audience that has been segmented as above. It usually takes various forms such as text, graphics, video, audio and then braille for those who are living with such disabilities. The message must be very plain and very simple to decode and retain.
The days are gone when messages will just be one-sided without considering the sensitive strata of society. All messages must be designed and disseminated with an inclusivity approach. Audiences such as women and the girl child, people living with disabilities and those with language barriers other than the main language of messaging must be given priority.
Your Channels
By channels, we mean the various means through which the encoded message will be disseminated to the audiences. Once this aspect is wrongly decided, the whole objective of the plan is defeated. A communication professional will never jump to conclude a certain kind of channel because of its popularity and acceptance, no matter how beautiful; without first studying what resonates with the audience. In other words, what channels are easily accessible to them, what platform they hang out on, what channels will best deliver these messages to them in the shortest possible time and deliver great results.
For your next very important event, endeavour to consider these areas with your team and measure the result afterwards.
