Introduction
Access empowers youth to find their next career opportunity through one-on-one mentorship, training and partnerships with local employers. Passion was no issue: Access employees cared deeply about making a difference among both youth and supporting small businesses.
However, there was one challenge: getting everyone to be on message with how to talk about Access and being clear about what their mission was. And with limited communications resources, the team didn’t quite know where to start when it came to updating their messaging. That’s where we came in.
Our Objectives
We aimed to teach the Access, Inc. team “how to fish” and set the team up for communications success through a series of workshops.
Here’s how we did it:
- We hosted a whiteboard strategy session to help the team identify their communications goals and audiences
- We then helped the team identify and build personas for the audience groups they most hoped to reach
- With personas in hand, we provided training to guide the team in developing their own VPSA (Values, Problem, Solution Action) framework, to serve as the building block of their messaging and a messaging triangle, or elevator speech, to streamline how they talked about Access to their different identified audiences
- Finally, we capped off our time together by creating a communications playbook that provided the team with templates, tips and resources for creating communications materials, including an editorial calendar, blog posts, newsletters and more.
The Outcome
As we concluded our work together, the team walked away with a communications playbook and game plan they were able to put into action right away. We can’t wait to see how the team takes these pointers to level up their communications across the board.
