Lesson 3 Monitoring the progress of your communication plan

Before you even start measuring the progress of your communication strategy, you need to have a clear idea of what progress means. It is very important to focus on this because, we cannot measure something if we do not know what it is.

Only if you are aware of your starting point can you evaluate how far you have gone. As a result, if your goal is clear and your communication plan is in line with it, be sure to mark your actual location. Register dates, information, and finances online or in a diary. Look at the statistics if you need to gauge social media data; if you want to increase your subscriber count, notice how many you now have; and so on.

Doing a yearly review the progress with your communication strategy, can be an intense but helpful exercise. On top of that, in a very informal way, I review my progress monthly.
This helps to:

• Stay focused on the objective
• Catch on time if something is not working
• Stay motivated

This is very much true if you are measuring analytics, you can screenshot the relevant pages and save it for your archive. However, this is also true for live events. And I have learned this the hard way.
Taking visual proof of the results of your communication strategy help you both to testify of its effectiveness but also to measure how far you have come.

If you are using different approaches with your communication strategy, you should take notes of how things change whenever you change platform or medium. What works? What brings you closer to your aim? Observe and always, take some time to give yourself a feedback.

Milestones help to stay focused and motivated. And they also help to measure the progress of your communication strategy. Even more if you give yourself the rule that you are not going to proceed any further until you have reached the milestone. Obviously, milestones have to serve the final aim we mentioned before and can never be an empty exercises.

If you are working for an organisation, it will be much easier to refer to a supervisor or someone who expects you to deliver on your communication strategy. But even if you are an entrepreneur or a side hustler, you can find an accountability partner. It can be a friend, a fellow entrepreneur, a coach or a mentor. But make sure you have to show someone how far you have come.

Don’t forget to add your own personal way to how you measure the progress of your communication strategy and have fun doing it!