Communications Strategy for Louisiana Planners

Center for Planning Excellence

At the beginning of 2006, Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX) was a fledgling organization in Louisiana. Primarily funded by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and the Louisiana Recovery Authority, CPEX was charged with the oversight and coordination of sustainable community planning efforts in hurricane ravaged Louisiana. CPEX engaged Matter to create a vision, mission, and plan for disseminating their brand to a variety of emotionally invested stakeholders, ranging from citizens to development groups to governmental bodies.

Having previously designed the CPEX identity, Matter saw the communication strategy as an opportunity to provide CPEX with foresight and a plan for reaching out to audiences in public, governmental, and private sectors.

A communication strategy would encourage CPEX audiences’ active participation and investment in the planning initiatives that would have major impacts in the recovery and progress of their communities. With such strict spending rules and financial accountability procedures, few nonprofit organizations have the resources to start out with such insight into how they can communicate their message and establish their brand; this is more often a luxury of businesses in the private sector.

To create the communication strategy for CPEX, Matter designed and facilitated a planning workshop. The workshop targeted these specific objectives:

Determine key CPEX brand aspects for communication purposes
Identify and define key CPEX audiences
Identify communication channel priorities
Explore specific communication needs

Matter then analyzed the data generated in the workshop and developed a comprehensive and well-defined plan for dissemination of the CPEX brand, then formalized the plan in a set of meaningful and visual documents. This communication strategy put CPEX communication needs in perspective and laid out a vision for meeting the challenges they face in establishing their independent, consultative role.

Strategizing early prevented an unsuccessful, piecemeal approach and reduced the amount of unexpected communication needs arising down the road.

Since the project, CPEX has had tremendous success in reaching out to their audiences and bringing them into the planning process in part because of their hard-working staff, and in part because they have a plan for talking about themselves and communicating who they are, by way of the communication strategy.

“CPEX approached Matter during a time of transition and growth for our non-profit organization. Matter not only created a style guide and a communications system for us, but assisted us in critical strategic thinking that really helped us set a future course for success. We have referenced our work with Matter numerous times in making important decisions and they really helped us craft and refine our organization’s image, communication and mission. We appreciated their creative and intuitive approach and would recommend them to others.” – Boo Thomas, Executive Director, CPEX