Strategic Communications for Public Leaders

Communication is essential to nearly everything your municipality or nonprofit organization undertakes. This hands-on workshop takes participants through the steps of developing a communication plan for any type of activity, from setting goals and identifying key audiences and messages, to selecting tactics and establishing timelines and budgets. Working in teams, participants will develop communication plans for real initiatives.

Course Goals:

• Understand the importance of communication planning and pitfalls of not planning
• Identify key audiences; develop key messages
• Understand when and how to use social media, news releases, email and other tactics.
• Working in teams, complete an actual communication plan for a participant’s organization or municipal initiative.

Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, Pinterest - the social media options available are overwhelming! But which platform is best for your organizations and which can meet your communications needs? This course will review how the right social media tools can be used in community engagement and public relations. The course materials include a toolkit for getting started with social media for personal and municipal use.  Tips on setting a social media policy for your municipal employees will also be discussed.

Course Goals:

• Explore how to integrate social media into existing communication efforts
• Discuss time-saving strategies for content creation
• Discuss how to manage a municipality or organization's social media efforts
• Discuss strategies for addressing social media trolls and other pests
• Explore effective public sector social media efforts

Today's government websites are multi-faceted. They deliver services, provide information, process requests, and inform the public. In this hands-on workshop, you will become familiar with the best practices in government website design and how it can be transformed into digital engagement portal through effective design, SEO, and analytics.

Course Goals:

• Explore best practices in website design and user engagement
• Analyze websites for the use of best practices
• Identify strategies to develop relevant and accessible content
• Develop strategies to improve a website

The news media can be a valuable conduit of important information to your key audiences. But working with the media can be challenging, as any public official knows. This workshop will discuss strategies for promoting “good” news and dealing with “bad” news; using social media vs. traditional media; developing productive relationships with reporters; the difference between hype and news; and the pros and cons of press conferences.

Course Goals:

• Understand different media types (mainstream, print, trade, professional, community vs. daily papers, periodicals, online publications) and how their differences determine your approach
• Learn tactics for being quoted accurately; getting good news reported.
• Develop organizational policies and procedures for communicating with the media
• Examine recent examples of good and mediocre media coverage
• Learn components of a news release or announcement (who, what, where, when, how).

During an emergency, the right message, from the right person, at the right time, can save lives. This module will provide you with a general overview of the effective and efficient methods for engaging in communications during emergency and crisis scenarios. Activities will focus on the nature and function of the news media in modern society, contemporary issues affecting media relations during an emergency, and crisis planning for dealing with the news media during high visibility events.

Course Goals:

• Apply the principles of crisis communication and their relationship with establishing trust and credibility.
• Create messages for any media encounter that effectively convey emotional content beyond fact-based responses
• Evaluate crisis communication and determine how facts affect stories
• Examine strategies for responding to negative media attention in a crisis