When Does an Organisation Need a Strategic Communications Consultant?
When Does an Organisation Need a Strategic Communications Consultant?
Most organisations know when they need a PR campaign. But not as many know when they need an overarching communications strategy solution.
Contrary to what some may believe, there are many situations where the challenge is bigger than routine execution and response.
The organisation needs someone to step back, understand the problem, and determine what needs to be built, changed, or strengthened from a communications and stakeholder management perspective.
That is where a strategic communications consultant can become particularly valuable.
But first things first.
What is a strategic communications consultant?
A strategic communications consultant is someone who enables businesses, brands, institutions, and organizations achieve desired outcomes through a purposeful and outcome-driven use of communication. They are experts who understand the science and art of communication and use it to drive strategic agendas for corporate, business, and institutional clients.
- Strategic communications consultants advise on how to manage transformation within a business.
- How to make a brand more visible in their sector; how to better reposition your brand to attract the desired attention.
- How to manage reputation or embed crisis management and communications response capability in your organization.
- How to positively enhance employee productivity through targeted internal communications.
- How to manage and mitigate issues proactively and how to manage communications risk in sensitive commercial conversations.
- Build resilient communications capability responses in your organization and ensure that reputation is managed as a critical asset for growth and business continuity.
But then, how does a CEO or a business leader recognize the right time to go looking for a strategic communications consultant?
Here are five common situations.
Scenario 1. When the problem requires critical thinking and problem-solving
Sometimes leadership knows there is an internal or external alignment problem but cannot clearly define how to resolve it because it falls outside of the normal technical function capability. It has to do with complex issues that require clarity, understanding of context and alignment on cause, effect and where responsibility lies for resolving.
There may be stakeholder dissatisfaction, reputational pressure, conflicting messages, or internal confusion.
The instinct is often to commission a campaign and go on a courtesy call or stakeholder engagement roadshow to tell your own side of the story
But before jumping to do that; someone needs to answer:
- What is happening?
- Why is it happening?
- Who is affected?
- Who are the most interested and influential parties in this situation?
- What do we know about the interested/influential stakeholders?
- What are their issues and concerns?
- What needs to change?
- What do we need to SAY and DO to make a change?
- What is within and outside of our control?
- What does success look like?
This is a diagnosis problem, not a campaign problem.
And this is something that a strategic communications consultant can help with
Scenario 2. When the organisation is evolving
Organisations change.
- They grow.
- They restructure.
- They enter new markets.
- They attract foreign investment.
- They acquire new stakeholders.
- They become subject to greater regulatory scrutiny.
- They transition from one organisational model to another.
They may also move from being relatively unknown entities to institutions or brands with significant public expectations.
When this happens, the communications function may need to evolve as well.
The question is simple:
The organisation has changed. But has communications transformed with it?
A strategic communications consultant can help assess the gap and determine what the new communications model should look like.
- Propose structures,
- Develop job descriptions;
- Produce a comprehensive communications competence framework tailored to the required skills and expertise levels
Scenario 3: When the communications function needs building
Some organisations have people doing communications without having a properly designed communications function.
They may lack clear structures, policies, processes, standards, frameworks, or performance measures.
Responsibilities may overlap.
- Decision-making may be unclear.
- Agency relationships may be poorly defined.
- The team may be highly operational but lack strategic capability.
This is not something another campaign can fix.
It is a function-building challenge.
The work may involve designing an operating model, communications governance framework, policies, processes, competency frameworks, reporting structures and strategic planning systems.
And this is exactly what a strategic communications consultant can help with.
Scenario 4. When stakeholder complexity has outgrown the existing model
Communications becomes significantly more complex as a brand becomes bigger, operations and influence grows and the number and diversity of stakeholders increase.
Consider an organisation that needs to communicate with the following groups:
- Employees.
- Investors and shareholders
- NGOs/activists
- Regulators.
- Government.
- Communities.
- Customers.
- Partners.
- Industry bodies.
- The media
- And the general public
Each stakeholder may have different interests, expectations and information needs. If each relationship is managed independently, communications can become fragmented. One stakeholder receives one message while another receives something completely different.
A strategic communications approach creates an architecture that connects these audiences while recognising their differences.
The objective is not to make every message identical. It is to make the organisation’s strategic narrative coherent at the macro-level and very tailored and relevant at the micro-level.
And that is the job of a strategic communications consultant.
Scenario 5: When the communications team needs to become more strategic
A team may be excellent at execution and still need capability development for strategic thinking or expansion of competencies in areas of the profession or to grow from skill to mastery in a competence area e.g crisis communications; change communications; impact storytelling; visual communications; reputation management; brand strategy etc
For example:
- Can its members diagnose communications problems?
- Can they advise senior leadership?
- Can they develop strategic frameworks?
- Can they map complex stakeholders?
- Can they lead change communications?
- Can they prepare the organisation for crises?
- Can they establish communications governance?
- Can they measure outcomes rather than simply outputs?
- Can they help drive a strategic agenda through strategic communications?
- Is their way of working resilient for all scenarios?
These are capability questions.
A strategic communications consultant can help assess existing competence, identify gaps, and develop the capabilities required for the organisation’s next stage.
What does the consultant do?
The role is not necessarily to become another execution vendor.
In many situations, the consultant works from the inside out:
Diagnose → Design → Build → Enable → Deploy
The consultant may diagnose the organisational communications challenge, design the strategic response, build structures and frameworks, enable the internal team and, where necessary, help bring execution partners into the architecture.
That means a PR agency, creative agency, media partner or other specialist vendor can still be part of the solution.
But they operate within a strategic system.
The trigger is not “we need more communication”.
The real trigger is often something deeper:
“Our organisation has changed, but our communications capability has not kept pace.”
When the problem involves strategy, organisational structure, governance, capability, stakeholder complexity, leadership readiness or transformation, another campaign may not be the answer.
The organisation may need to step back and redesign how communications work.
That is where strategic communications consulting begins.
And sometimes the most strategic communications decision an organisation can make is to stop asking:
“Who can execute this campaign?”
And start asking:
“What does our organisation actually need communications to accomplish?”
Sola Abulu & Associates (SA&A) is a strategy and communications consulting and training firm dedicated to enabling businesses, brands and institutions to achieve their desired objectives through strategic communications, organizational effectiveness and reputation risk management.
Email us on consulting@solaabuluassociates.com for consulting inquiries