Strategic Communications

We assure the world knows who you are, where you’re headed and why they want to get onboard.

The four Canoe Group partners share a common background in strategic communications – we’ve worked in public and media relations, political advocacy and campaigns, fundraising, community relations, marketing, graphic design, branding, employee relations, and change communications.

Strategic communications align support for your intentions.  In this age of information overload, an organization is only as good as its communications strategy, and a communications strategy is only good if it starts from clear, concise and inspired messaging.

How Does Branding Relate To Strategic Communications?

Developing your brand is similar to developing a strategic plan.  First you think very long and hard about your competition and your current situation, then you vision where you want to go.  In brand development, the next step is to define your organization with words and visual images – pictures, photos, icons – that you use consistently over time.  You reinforce one core message that says “who you are.” In our media-saturated world, it’s all about the repetition.

For some clients, we facilitate the creation of brand clarity, and then partner with selected designers to help implement the brand basics of logo, wordmark, slogan and/or icon.

For other clients, The Canoe Group designs and/or implements strategic communications to support more specific organizational goals.

The Core Of Strategic Communications

….is a multi-tiered strategy that employs the most effective – and the most cost-effective – tools.  To plan successful strategic communications, The Canoe Group helps our clients decide:

• What are the communications goals: What do you want people to know, how do you want them to feel, what do you want them to do?  In short, what results are you seeking?
• Who are the target audiences you want to reach?  (Realize that the more you tailor your communications and your delivery strategies, the more successful your communications will be.)
• What messages do you want each of those target audiences to receive?  And once you have “niched” your messages, what’s the common message and how does it connect to your brand?
• What strategies will you use to deliver those messages?  This is where The Canoe Group helps most.  Our gift is that we understand that actions speak louder than words.  Frequently we recommend our clients communicate their intentions through unexpected and innovative actions that call attention to and express message and are then supported by more traditional communications tools.  Of course, the press and media are always on the lookout for the unexpected and innovative, so we often are able to increase your opportunity for free media coverage.

The Canoe Group also knows that strategy is only as effective as execution.  We do more than plan communications strategy.  We make sure you can implement it with creativity, both effectively and efficiently.

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• Creating new ways of thinking about an issue requires new process tools.