Add a Messaging Audit to Your Summer To-Do List

May 9, 2024

By: Peter Panepento

Summer offers a chance to recharge your batteries, take some vacation time, and get a head start on the projects that lie ahead.

It’s also a great time to review your recent work to ensure it is aligning with your brand, advancing your mission, and connecting with your key audiences.
One way to do that is by conducting a messaging audit.

Well-run organizations audit their finances. But most don’t take the time to review their communications to ensure that their storytelling, website language, and marketing efforts are achieving their desired results.

In the same way a financial audit can correct mistakes and uncover inefficiencies, a messaging audit can unearth bad habits that have burrowed their way into your communications, identify areas where you can improve language, and yield ideas that will help make your future campaigns sing.

When done well, a messaging audit can answer questions such as:

• Are our communications, marketing, and PR messages aligning with our brand guidelines — or have we gotten off track?
   

• Are our communications and key messages truly advancing our mission?
   

• Are we using too much insider jargon or politicized language that turns off key segments of our audience?
   

• Are we framing our messages appropriately or are we falling into bad habits that present stories through a deficit-based rather than an asset-based frame?
   

• Are we presenting stories effectively and creatively?
   

• Are our stories and examples reflective of the communities we serve?
   

• Are we unconsciously advancing stereotypes through the stories we tell or the ways we tell them? (Our Guide to Ethical Storytelling can help explore this question in greater depth).

Your audit can take several forms.

You can review everything you’ve produced during a specific time period (say, your most recent quarter or year-to-date), or you can randomly choose some examples of your recent work.

You can conduct the audit within your department, engage others in your organization who can provide an outside perspective, or (in the best case) you can enlist trusted audience members to provide insights through interviews or surveys.

But no matter what form it takes, your audit should be done with a clear eye — and with the goal of identifying action steps that will ensure your messaging is as sharp and on-brand as possible.

Need help? Our team can provide you with a complimentary consulting session to help you get started — or we can dig deeper and conduct an audit for you.

The important takeaway, though, is that it’s important to create a process for objectively reviewing your communications and messaging and then take steps to course correct, as needed.

And there’s no better time to get started than this summer.