The Challenge

Each primary team and most sub-teams managed marketing and communications independently, without central coordination or strategy. This decentralized approach led to:

Redundant outreach to the same audiences
Overlapping program and event campaigns
Inconsistent messaging and branding
Inefficient use of staff resources

My Approach

Recommendations

Leadership recognized the need to centralize communications planning and development to better serve stakeholders, achieve programmatic goals, and improve staff satisfaction through greater efficiency, consistency, and impact.

Over a 12-week period in 2024, I led a collaborative assessment process:

Stakeholder Engagement: Conducted seven individual or team interviews, observed two working group meetings, and administered a staff survey with 90% participation.
Research & Audit: Reviewed all communications channels-digital and traditional-including paid advertising, PR, printed collateral, personal outreach, and organic/owned digital media. Identified six external and nine internal audience groups.

Key Findings

Multiple teams communicated with overlapping audiences, causing at least 30% of a target audience to receive multiple, uncoordinated messages in the same week.
Content was typically created on an as-needed basis, with little cross-team sharing. All team leaders cited last-minute reviews and approvals as a recurring issue.

Centralized Planning: Implement an office-wide communications calendar and standard operating procedures, overseen by leadership.
Collaboration: Launch two monthly cross-team meetings-one for approvers and one for content developers. Hold additional one-on-one meetings with the chief of staff and team communications leads. Define roles clearly for staff feedback.
Standardization: Introduce shared templates two to three months after the calendar and meetings are established.

Outcomes, Lessons Learned & Next Steps

Analysis & Assessment: Analyzed campaign data for redundancies and gaps. Email marketing was the dominant channel for every team, resulting in overuse, mixed messages, and conflicting calls to action.
Benchmarking: Compared the office’s practices to current industry standards. Despite recruiting for one of the largest employee groups in a municipal agency-on par with Fortune 500 companies-the office lacked comparable resources for staff, training, and marketing.

There were no standardized templates or regular schedules for key communications. Every team independently created its own email formats, newsletters, and flyers.
The absence of a shared content calendar led to over 50% of messages being delayed or conflicting with other teams’ communications.

Content was typically created on an as-needed basis, with little cross-team sharing. All team leaders cited last-minute reviews and approvals as a recurring issue.

Measurement: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as open rates, completion of calls to action, click-throughs, event attendance, and other relevant metrics.
Professional Development: Provide quarterly staff training on collaborative planning, editorial calendars, and data-driven decision making.

Be ready to diffuse initial resistance.
Referencing corporate comparables gave context to the tension between expectations and capacity. Trust created safe spaces for clarifying one-on-one conversations. And, opening the discussion about the need for job and role definitions validated concerns.
Listen to employee voices.
Staff highlighted their priorities, like the importance of clear roles and a phased rollout to support adoption of new practices.
Set a deliberate pace.
Successful strategies included piloting new processes individually, using data to inform decisions, and holding regular cross-team check-ins.

Create a runway, not a destination.
The office plans to expand centralized communications by integrating affordable technology, increasing communications-trained staff, and streamlining analytics with a new applicant tracking system.

Marketing + Communications Functions

The Client

A large urban education office with about seventy-five employees, structured into five primary teams (verticals) and thirteen sub-teams, operates within a major municipal public agency. This agency serves a system larger than many Fortune 500 companies, managing a complex network of internal and external stakeholders.