The first step in successfully communicating with the public is developing a plan for getting out your message. Your message is your theme with an objective, such as to persuade someone to do something or to support something. It is capturing your ideas in a way that can be understood and accepted by others. For example, if you want citizens to pay lower taxes, your message might be about cutting taxes to stimulate the economy.

Why not just throw out this message to the public and let it take its course? Because, chances are you won't get anywhere if you do.

You wouldn't get into your car and drive without knowing where you were going, what roads you were going to take, what you were going to do when you got there, and whom you wanted to see when you arrived. That would be a waste of time, effort, and gasoline. You need to plan where you are headed and how you will get there - and even what will happen if you have an accident in your car or a mishap in your plan.

This is also true in developing a message, putting it into a communications plan, devising a media campaign to carry it out, and assessing the strategy as you implement it. If you don't know how to get to where you want to go, you won't get there.

If you want to make economic changes in the way the government is run, for instance, you need to communicate why you are proposing what you want to do, what effect it will have and on whom, how much it will cost or how much it will save, how you will know whether or not the program reaches its goals, and how long it will take to do so. The communications plan is your map to reach your destination; the media campaign represents the roads to get there.

The Message Starts With the Leader

The government public affairs/press office plans and implements a media campaign, but that can be done only when the government leader is on board and has presented clear goals. Developing goals and themes does not rest with the press office. Ideally, the top official, working with his press secretary and senior staff, has articulated three to five objectives or themes that he or she would like to accomplish long term — say, by the end of the year or the end of his or her term in office. (More than five major themes can be too much for the public to absorb.) As an example, these are five that one recently democratized state considered: advance European Union reforms, achieve military reforms to get closer to NATO membership, achieve civil service reforms, achieve privatization goals, push through agricultural reforms.

The themes should be articulated repeatedly and made a focal point of the administration. As much as possible, every action the official takes — from delivering a speech, to giving a television interview, to supporting legislation — should center around these long-term objectives. Certainly, the official will have to develop short-term messages to deal with immediate crises as they crop up, but the overall goals should constantly be repeated and returned to.

A consistent message is most useful when a new issue requires acceptance by the public. Misunderstandings often stem from a lack of basic information and discussion. Thus, the government must provide clear, repeated, and open communication on the issue in order to earn public understanding and acceptance for its objectives.

Governmental leaders sometimes learn this the hard way: when they are not re-elected to office. Surveys in one recently democratized state showed that the citizens knew they had to suffer some difficult economic times to get to an improved economy, but they did not know that was also the plan of the governmental leaders. The government articulated no message. Government officials had said they wanted a stronger economy, but they had never spelled out what steps were being taken to get there, why certain measures had to be taken, how their plan would work, when better times could be expected, who would be affected and how, and where the biggest impact would be felt. Instead, they focused their attention on the legislature and let the press set the agenda. To the public, they appeared to be lurching from crisis to crisis.

Creating a Communications Plan

Once the message is decided upon and the goals are identified, the government press office writes up a plan to move the leader's vision into reality. A first step is research, often by the long-term communications staff, into how the goals can be achieved and what it will mean in the interim and long terms.

With the goals and research in hand, the press staff can do a public relations audit. This is an assessment of how the action and goals are viewed by those within the organization and those outside. It involves talking to government executives to gain their views on the strengths and weaknesses of the organization or a specific program or a plan, and talking to the public to determine their views. By evaluating the two perceptions, it is possible to write up a public relations "balance sheet" of strengths and weaknesses and then develop a plan on how to capitalize on the strengths and deal with the weaknesses.

A communications plan can also be written without an audit. Begin with themes. Decide what you want to achieve at the end of a year or legislative period, or at the end of a term in office. Develop a focused and clear message. Ask yourself these questions:

• Is there a statement of principles?
• What goals do I want to achieve? Pick a realistic number — no more than five a year — on which to focus, and then break them down into what you would like to achieve this year, next year, and so forth.
• What do I want the media to communicate?
• What messages are needed for women, for students, for the elderly, for military personnel, for other audiences?
• What media strategy will communicate each message? You might decide to emphasize a theme a week. You could have sub-themes within an overall theme. For example, if improving education were a theme, subthemes might be improving teacher education, involving parents more in the educational system, lengthening the school day or year, and so forth.

Beginning with this kind of analysis, you can formulate a media campaign that you can use to educate people, influence public opinion, persuade opinion leaders, generate debate, and get people to take an action.

"To communicate effectively, you must identify a need; prioritize what is most important; decide what you want to communicate; have it be relevant to your audience; and then repeat it," says former White House spokesperson Dee Dee Myers. "You can't say everything. You have to decide what is most important to say, focus on whom you are saying it to, and say it in terms that make sense to them. Then you have to repeat the message over and over, because people are busy and have a lot of information coming at them in a 24-hour news cycle."

Working Out a Media Campaign

In working out a media campaign, you would:

• Devise a plan on how to reach your goals.
  
• Break the plan down by assignments.
  
• Write out a schedule of who does what and by what date, and update it frequently.
  
• Appoint a supervisor to monitor the assignments to ensure that work is on schedule.
  
• Change goals and deadlines as needed.
  
• Meet regularly with those involved in the plan — everyone from press secretary to the chief of staff, the scheduler, the speechwriter, and the legislative aide.
  
• Approve the plan with the group.
  
• Implement the plan.
  
• Use events to reinforce the themes.
  
• Put the goals into legislation.
  
• Focus on the goals in speeches.
  
• Target various subtexts of your message to your different audiences.
  
• Have surrogates or outside experts give the same message on your goals as you do.
  
• Answer the who, what, when, where, why, and how of typical news stories to help move your vision into a message that can be readily understood.

In regard to this last point, it is important to be prepared to tell the public:

• What the program is and what it is not.
  
• Why it is needed.
  
• How it will affect them.
  
• What will happen in the short term.
  
• What will happen in the long term.
  
• How this is different from what is already happening.
  
• What the government's responsibility in the new program is.
  
• What the timeline is and when changes will take effect.
  
• What will happen if it doesn't work.
  
• How the public will know if it has been successful.
  
• What action the public is being asked to take.