A communications audit may sound painful – like a root canal – but it could be one of the most important things you do for your association this year.

Here are four signs that your organization could benefit from a communications audit.

1.      You’ve hit a wall on effectiveness.

Conversions are down. Engagement on your social posts has flattened or is declining. Your email clicks are dropping. Time spent on your website is flat or declining. You find yourself sending more and more emails just to keep your event attendance at the same level.

2.      Membership or event growth has flattened.

You’re struggling to find new members to replace the members who don’t renew. The same may apply to attendees at your bigger revenue-generating events.

3.      You’ve had a leadership change.

Maybe you’re new to the communications role. Or you have a new CEO who’s asking insightful (OK, difficult) questions about the communications strategy. Or perhaps, a new cadre of board members is asking the same questions, and you need answers.

4.      Your members can’t find anything, and don’t know what you do.

You communicate with them a lot. You send them emails. You populate your social feeds. Your website is modern, and you update it often. But your members still say they can’t find the information they want on your site, or they never knew about a webinar that they would be interested in.

How a communications audit helps you

The best way to address these problems is to do an audit. It will provide a deep dive analysis to determine a path forward. You could make educated guesses as to what will work, but that would be a frustrating, hit or miss exercise.

Only a comprehensive audit provides you with hard evidence to tell you what’s going on, and why. You will have more confidence to make better decisions and take action.

But at the risk of sounding self-serving, there are three good reasons why you shouldn’t do it yourself.

First, you don’t have the time to do it right, on top of everything else that’s on your plate.

Second, it’s an objective third-party analysis, providing a fresh perspective on things. An external advisor will also have more freedom to recognize and deliver the hard truths, and provide industry insights without fear of repercussion.

Third, they’re evidence based. As John Adams said, facts are stubborn things. When an organization is at a stalemate, it’s often because opinions are competing against opinions.

What happens in a communications audit?

Each practitioner may approach the work a little differently, but there are common threads:

• All of your communications activities are included – digital and non-digital. Nothing is off the table.

• An audit is evidence-based. The process combines quantitative and qualitative research. providing both left-brain and right-brain insights. When I conduct an audit, I do a deep analysis of metrics from your website, newsletters, social feeds, media relations, IRL events and other channels. Combined, this evidence provides insights into what your members consume, what prompts them to act, and where it’s worth investing your time and money. As a wise colleague once told me, you can do anything you want, but you can’t do everything.

• An audit will benchmark your organization against competitors and allied organizations. They may even introduce ideas from outside your industry.

• A thorough audit will require at least several months to do effectively.

• It will provide strategic, actionable, short-term and long-term recommendations – things you can start doing tomorrow, as well as actions that will improve communications over the next 12 to 18 months.

See? That wasn’t terribly painful.

I love doing audits. They’re immersive exercises where I get to learn about an organization quickly and intensively. At the end, I experience the satisfaction of making a real difference in helping organizations fulfill their mission.

One last thing: I’ve known some communications leaders who hesitate to ask for an audit because it might be an implicit admission that they’re doing something wrong.

Don’t be one of those people. Communications is always changing, and it’s a challenge to keep pace. There’s no shame in acknowledging that.

The best pros know this. They prove their value to their organizations by continuously evolving and staying ahead of the curve.

Be that person.

Want to talk more? Contact me at ffortin@highrockstrategies.com.