Strategic Communication Workflow

Strategic Communication Overview:

This workflow empowers local government workers to efficiently craft and execute strategic communication plans that align with their objectives - from listening to residents all the way to publishing back to the community. If your organization role is focused on social media, news monitoring, or public information, this flow will be particularly relevant to your day-to-day work and can streamline processes using Zencity tools.

Here is summary of the process steps:

Strategic Communication Workflow Steps

There are three stages to executing a strategic communication plan. These steps can be used for recurring processes like tracking and internally sharing media conversations related to your area. They can also be used for specific special events, emergencies, or key topics that need communications support.

Phase: Communication Planning

Purpose: Follow the conversation to learn what animates your residents at this very moment, or monitor the current conversation on a known topic of interest.

Zencity Tools:

• • Organic: Check the dashboard on a daily or weekly basis to monitor community conversations across news and social media. Use filters or click on AI-driven highlights to discover trends, anomalies, and sentiment. To see just news sources, visit the Organic News Feed dashboard.
  • Organic: In Organic Projects, narrow in on one incident, topic, or campaign by creating a  project and monitoring the project dashboard. To dig deeper, request an analyst Insight.
  • Organic: Navigate to the Analytics tab in Organic Publishing to measure your social media engagement performance and track your account growth.
  • Organic:  Subscribe to helpful digests and alerts to stay up-to-date on Organic areas of interest. Visit Subscriptions in the main navigation menu - from there, you can sign up for email digests on subjects like top projects, news roundups, trending topics, or custom conversations. You can also set up custom alerts for specific keywords. 
  • Community Survey: Review the live feed in your Community Surveys to spot emerging issues in real time. 

Phase: Communication Delivery

Purpose: Create relevant messaging to communicate with your community, informing and engaging on key topics, events, or issues.

Zencity Tools:

• • Organic: Utilize Publishing in Organic to collaborate, schedule, and post to your social media accounts. Leverage insights and takeaways from your Organic dashboard to drive relevant messaging and streamline posts through connected Publishing Profiles. You can also edit and approve scheduled posts within your team in the Drafts & Scheduled tab and plan out your posting schedule in the Calendar tab. Make sure to take advantage of the Auto-Post Writer when adding a new post, using the AI tool to easily create engaging content. 
  • Organic: When writing a public press release, visit News Feed in Organic to use the Press Release Generator, which employs AI to create a polished press release draft using your custom prompts.
  • Engage: Create an Engage project to keep residents informed on known topics of interest. Integrate an Engagement survey to drive community interaction and collect targeted feedback.

Phase: Communication Evaluation

Purpose: Determine the effectiveness of your communication strategy and evaluate your community’s response to your interventions and messaging.

Zencity Tools:

• • Organic: Funnel information to key stakeholders by creating one-off PDF reports or recurring reports. Easily turn the data you are viewing in an Organic dashboard into a one-off report by clicking "Create Report" and selecting "One Time Report." To make a dashboard report that is recurring, click on "Create Report" and select "Template Report." Template reports can be saved for future report generation and can be scheduled on a regular basis. 
  • Reports: The Reports section in the main navigation menu also is a helpful jumping off point for report building. In Reports, go to Templates & Drafts. From this area, you can build a one-off report or template from scratch or from an existing template. To learn more about Reports, use the resources at the bottom of this article.

Strategic Communication Examples

This workflow is focused on streamlining your communication efforts, making informed decisions, and enhancing your outreach. Some practical examples for Project Engagement include:

• Emerging Stories
• Special Events
• Emergency/Crisis Management
• Media Relations
• Public Engagement Campaign
• Social Media Management

For specific application examples, check out these two helpful case studies from Zencity.

• How to Town of Abington, MA Used Sentiment Analysis to Develop an Emergency Communications Plan
• How the West Sacramento, CA, Police Department Used Zencity to Handle Messaging Following an Officer-involved Shooting

Strategic Communication Checklist and Resource Links

A checklist to guide you through the Strategic Communication workflow can be found within your Customer Hub. Use this resource within the Zencity platform for working through the steps of this workflow.

To access a checklist offline, click below to download a PDF version that your organization can utilize.

There are many additional articles and videos available to you in this Help Center that are relevant to implementing Strategic Communication steps. Listed below are some key resources to support you in using workflow-related Zencity tools:

• Strategic Communication Checklist (1).pdf70 KB