No matter how you look at the problem, every good communication program starts out with one basic step: Defining what you want to accomplish? Imagine you and your friends want to play football with some new friends, ones you never played with before, and play the game on their field. Before you can have any hope of winning you need to know where the goal posts are and how to score points.  Then you need to know who the other teams are and what rules they use. If we apply that sand box logic to real life communications we have a great outline of the first step in any successful communication program. Lets call it “define your goals.”

 The most important step in defining your goals is to clearly define what it is you want people to do. That may sound obvious, even childish, but I have been in a lot of planning sessions for big budget programs where the entire program evolved to that stage without anyone actually defining what they wanted  “The People” to do.

 Laugh if you want, in our crazy world it can be enough that someone puts a line in a budget which reads “ IEC Materials” or “ Communication Campaign” with a number after it, to have us all scurrying about a few months later. That may well be how you were landed in this mess in the first place. The reality is that for a lot of the big shot budget planner’s communication is just another line in the proposal, which makes the entire program more appealing for funding.

 Knowing what you want to accomplish demands answers to a few basic questions. What do you actually want to achieve? What do you expect from the people you will be talking to? What’s in this for you? What’s in this for them?

 Write out the answers to those questions in as few words as possible, and then read over what you just wrote. Now, rewrite it again in even fewer words, until the whole thing is absolutely as short as you can possibly make it without loosing any real meaning. When you finish nail that paper to the wall in front of your desk where you can clearly see it. You will be referring to it frequently over he next few days, weeks, months.

 Once you clearly express your objectives the next step is to find out what percentage of “The People” are already doing what you want, and even more importantly find out why they are doing it.

 There are a lot of ways to do this, seems everyone has their own pet theory on how to sample populations. The reality is in how much money can you spend on researching and establishing your target audience. Can you afford a big name consultant with years of professional experience or must you and your “assistants” get out in the streets and villages to ask questions?

 Do not cut corners here, unless you absolutely must. If you target the wrong segment of the population you will have lost the game before your first poster goes up. “Hang on“, you say, “But you were talking about the people who already are doing what I want them to do!” That’s right, by knowing who is already acting the way you want them to - and the all important why - you have a pretty good idea what would convince others to act the same way.

 Another thing happens while you out there, wearing out your shoes and your voice, asking all those questions: you will meet a lot more people who do not act the way you want and they are going to explain to you why they act the way they do. Those are the people you want to target, explaining the obstacles you must over come.

 There is a natural tendency for first timers to hit the streets looking for the people who do not act they way you want.  They actually tend to ignore the ones who are already “in your camp” thinking “we have that lot: now we need to get the others. ”Wrong attitude! Do not fall into that trap.

 Both segments are equally important. One segment will give you some valid reasons why people should act your way, while the other will explain why people do not act your way. Listening to both groups you are going to build up a very good idea of exactly whom you will need to be talking to and what you need to say. Got that? I truly hope so, because it will appear on your test.

 Bosses aside, people are really not that stupid. They usually have reasons for acting a certain way. Granted those reasons may seem a bit strange to you - maybe that’s why they call you a stranger. But, for those people their reasons are valid enough to govern a certain segment of their life style, and that’s what really matters. I suggest you ponder that thought, a lot of people in this business miss it entirely, which maybe why so many communications campaigns fail. Your objective, and therefore the objective of your campaign, is to use the existing reasons why plus a few of your own to over come the reasons why not.