Communications Audit

Audits are on people's minds these days what with taxes coming up and all. So the words Communications Audit caught my attention. Sounds impressive, yes? Let's take an inventory of our communications, account for all the ways we talk to each other. Inspect how we are conveying information to see if we can improve.

One of the business classes here assigns students to perform one in the local business of their choice. I asked the faculty person to put the library on the list of possible sites. My goal was to see if we could improve our communications inside the library. Amongst each other. A result of having moved into a facility where our offices are at some distance from one another. And incidentally, it would be nice to look at how we communicate with our users as well.

Surprise! We are doing fairly well internally, but externally, we are abysmal. The poor student who was interviewing me made a few timid remarks about her honors paper and how difficult is was for her to find the resources she needed to address her topic.

What started out to be an audit turned into a research session. She was amazed to find that there is a lot of material available if you just know which sources to use and what the right words are. These days its about focusing, eliminating and paring down your search results, not increasing them.

After our session, she wanted to know if we could send an email to all the students to tell them about our wonderful resources and invite them to come to a few classes. And that brought us right back to the communications audit. I handed her the flier listing the classes we are offering. She was floored. She had never seen it, didn't realize the importance of coming to one of the classes. As she read through the list, she admitted that she should have taken most of them.

So we aren't getting out message out. How does it help anyone if we spend a ton on money on excellent resources but no one uses them because they don't know we have them!!??!! What other resources do we have that are going to waste because no one knows about them?

I suspect she will help get the message out. A happy customer is the best PR. She emailed me after our chat to tell me that when the class assignment for a PR plan is due, she is planning on handing in one for the library. Hoorah! Maybe if you communicate the right message to the right person, things change. Sure sounds promising.