An internal communications audit is an amazing tool any comms professional can use to assess their current strategy and plan for the future. This assessment is a great way to prove your ROI to the company and earn your seat at the table.
What is an Internal Communications Audit?
An internal communications audit is a systematic review of your company’s internal communication strategies, campaigns, and tools.
An audit assesses how effectively your communication strategies are aligned with company goals and contributing to success. By evaluating communication channels, content, and engagement metrics, the audit identifies strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
Why Conduct An Internal Communications Audit?
It is important to conduct an internal comms audit annually and whenever you start a new position. This process is instrumental in determining how internal comms is functioning at your company and finding where any gaps might exist. As you begin forming your internal communication strategy and annual budgets, the data and information you gather from your comms audit will also help you hone in on the right strategy and changes that need to be made.
These audits help you:
- Accurately assess your current efforts. An audit provides a comprehensive assessment of your current internal communications initiatives, tools, and channels. This evaluation helps you understand what’s working, what’s not, and what needs improvement.
- Align your strategy with company goals. Auditing allows you to align your internal communications strategies with your organization’s goals. By evaluating whether your current tactics are aligned with company objectives, you can ensure that your efforts contribute directly to the company’s success.
- Identify barriers. An internal communications audit helps you uncover the barriers in your path to success such as information silos, unclear messaging, or inefficient channels.
- Maximize resources. By identifying redundant or underperforming channels, you can allocate resources more efficiently, ensuring that your efforts generate maximum impact.
- Adapt to change faster. Companies are constantly evolving, and your communication strategies must evolve with them. An audit highlights areas where your strategies might be outdated or incompatible with current trends, enabling you to adapt to changes more effectively.
What Should a Communications Audit Include?
Every audit should review each internal communication touch point at your company. This includes all the campaigns that the internal comms team sends as well as the known messages being shared by other departments and leaders.
Your audit should cover the messages you send, the channels of communication you have access to, and a matrix of current and aspirational messages you send. And, ultimately, your audit should include the primary business objectives that employee communication has an impact on.
How Do You Carry Out a Communications Audit?
Team of one? No problem. You can conduct an audit even if you’re a one-person internal comms team.
To carry out an audit, you will complete some of the work on your own and then consult with key stakeholders and leaders across the business. When you work cross-functionally, make sure you’re asking them about their goals and use this to form a plan for how internal comms will support them.
You may also decide to hire a consultant to assist you with your audit. But don’t feel like you have to pay an external resource to audit your comms plan. Anyone can do an audit!
What Our Audit Guide Contains:
- Internal comms audit overview:
- What an audit is
- Why you should conduct an audit annually
- How to set goals for your audit ahead of time
- Step-by-step walkthrough of how to conduct an audit of internal communication, including your:
- Audiences
- Channels
- Current & future messages
- How to use employee personas with your audit findings
- How to use your audit to create message maps
- Steps for using your audit results to launch a new channel
- Resources for conducting an internal comms audit, including:
- Audit Template (includes message mapping)
- Persona Template
- Links to best practices on measurement and getting leadership buy-in
