Communication Planning
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What best practices have you put in place for both internal and external communication planning as part of the integration?
Its Most important to Communication at any Planning. it was because all thing will be final before starting at any new journey and any other mission. and improve Communication skill.
When it comes to keeping everyone in the loop during a merger, I’ve found a few key practices really make a difference. On the inside, it’s all about making sure leaders are clear about what’s happening and why, setting up a go-to team for all merger updates, and keeping those lines of communication wide open for feedback. Regular updates and specific meetings help everyone understand how changes might affect their area. Externally, crafting a solid, unified message that lays out the merger’s benefits and keeping stakeholders like customers and investors in the know is crucial.
The most critical communication is the one on Day1 or the first mass announcement to the Target’s employees, which is often immediately followed by external communication. We have a small group of comms professionals within the integration team planning every detail of that event and a separate action plan for that purpose (hours:minutes, channel, content reference, etc.). The content for different target audiences and media channels is prepared and signed-off in advance.
Otherwise internal communication and alignment on different levels are reoccurring throughout the entire integration.Effective communication planning is essential for the success of any PMI, as best practices can be considered for internal communication a dedicated team that includes elements from both companies ensuring the message is consistent across all channels and aligned with the integration strategy, should be defined all the official channels to spread the communication and these channels should be as much broadly as possible, don’t forget social media. Regular updates, weekly basis with the integration status, etc.
We have informed the board twice a month. The whole organisation is normally only informed after closing and no addtional communication outside the project team takes place.
We use a Communication Playbook that helps the team to identify the audience of each communication step, which tool to use for the communication and helps us to visualize the timeline and the impact it might have on different groups; therefore it helps to identify gaps we might have not considered during the initial planning, helps to identify different messages that we want to stress to different target audiences and helps to identify problems in the timeline – e.g. overlapping messaging, messages too late to a certain audience.
We review these playbooks every so often, depending on the stage we are in.We need to make sure we have the right communication experts in the organization. If we see gaps, best to hire a PR firm for the duration of the transaction and integration.
In your M&A experience how does communication planning differ depending on the type of merger/acquisition it is? i.e. Preservation, symbiosis, holding or absorption?
Build up a communication starting on Day 1. The communication plan should schedule internal and external communication with a decreasing frequency over time for the first year.
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