Afer the success of the ‘summer hacks’ series, I thought I would do another one to give you some quick hacks to help you at this busy end of year period.

This is episode one of three and focuses on reviewing and assessing your success from 2021 in order to plan 2022. Reviewing and measuring your impact means you can hire an effective team, you can focus your budget and effort where it’s needed, and you will start to see better results.

The great thing about this episode is it can be used for your personal life goals as well as work. What do you need to do to hit your goals in 2022?

let’s dive in!

Download my free resource to help you start recording your activity to effectively plan for 2022 nd beyond!:

My Activity Tracker: https://bit.ly/TrackActivity

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PS – Did you know? Communication Strategy That Works is in the top 90 UK Small Business Podcasts you must listen to

in 2021, by Feedspot.

 

Transcription (unedited)

If you do anything in 2022 you need to start measuring your comms impact.  Reviewing and measuring your impact means you can hire an effective team, you can focus your budget and effort where it’s needed, and you will start to see better results.

 

The great thing about this episode is it can be used for your personal life as well as work, what do you need to do to hit your goals in 2022?

 

It’s common for teams or businesses to inherit ways of doing things.  Trying to change old and tired methods can be hard, but here are 3 things to help you review your comms plan effectively for your business or organisation or your personal goals, reflect on what’s working and what’s not and reform your plans for 2022.

 

I am going to use work examples in this episode but you can easily supplant the examples for your personal goals.

 

Firstly, you need to have kept a record. So there may be some effort involved to gather data and that might include number of email sent to customers, and the success or not of those emails.  It might include feedback forms form events and PR obtained from awards entries or proactive new announcements.  It might also include how engaged your audience is on social media.

 

Ive worked in house in busy teams big and small.  THe first time you do this is hard as you may not have a process in place so compile what you can and set a benchmark for next time.  This is how you can start to measure your success.

 

Secondly, positively review what’s gone well, pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for those wins and make a list of what’s worked well. The first rule of measuring your impact is getting used to reviewing your work and your teams work constructively so you also need to then make a list of what’s not worked as well, what you tried and were not that pleased with or whether something just didn’t fly and, importantly, record why that was.  When someone suggests you float a giant pound sign down the river next year to raise awareness of tax increases, you may want to remind them of why you should (or shouldn’t do that) and your data will be invaluable to help make your argument to yourself of your management team.

 

Thirdly, you need to agree on what to take forward.  I like to use start, stop and continue for this.  What you need to start doing is what you could try based on your findings from this year’s comms activity, what new thing will you start doing based on where you see gaps in your comms activity.   Stop is for those activities that are just not showing you a return, maybe these are those activities you do ‘just because’ and there’s no tangible value to them.  Put thee in the Stop column and and make sure you add a reason why so you can reflect back on it.  Finally is the continue column, these are those activities that are showing you a return and you need to nurture and get better at, these are where to focus your time in 2022.

 

Now this can be applied to your personal life of your work life.  If you run a business or have a career plan, what do you need to start, stop or continue doing to hit your goals in 2022?

 

I hope you enjoyed these first of the festive hacks series. See you next week.