The Internal Communications Pocket Guide.
Ninety-five pages on borrowing from the disciplines outside internal comms, and what happens when you do. Free, no email.
PDF to read and print. EPUB for phone and tablet.
Internal comms is the only discipline with a captive audience.
Everything else has to earn attention from people who can walk away: marketing, content strategy, search, behavioural science, design. Their tools work on an audience used to being told what to do.
Two examples, of about forty.
Conversion writers have spent decades on the first line, the single action and what sits above the fold, because their readers can leave. Your readers can’t, which is exactly why the discipline is worth borrowing.
The techniques that make a website findable work on an intranet too. Descriptive headings, information scent, one authoritative source. People stop asking three colleagues where the policy lives.
Sixteen specialists, none of them from internal comms.
Weick on sensemaking, Kahneman on judgement under pressure, Norman on design, Thaler and Sunstein on friction, Crestodina on findability, Handley on writing, Edmondson on safety, Coombs on crisis, Mollick on AI.
Twelve principles. Nine pocket tools.
- Start with the problem, not the message
- Build the evidence base
- Understand the employee’s real question
- Decide what communication must achieve
- Create one governing idea
- Write for trust and action
- Match the channel to the job
- Equip leaders and managers
- Communicate change as a sequence
- Handle sensitive communication
- Listen, measure and adapt
- Govern the system
- Monday-morning triage
- One-page communication brief
- Sensitive-message trust check
- Publish check
- Manager conversation card
- Listening session guide
- Measurement ladder
- After-action review
- Transfer test card
Use what you need when you need it.
About the guide.
Who is the Internal Communications Pocket Guide for?
Internal communications managers, advisers and change communicators who already know the job and want an edge.
Is the guide free?
Yes. It is free in PDF and EPUB, with no email address required.
What is in the guide?
Twelve principles covering diagnosis, evidence, audience questions, outcomes, message architecture, writing, channels, leaders and managers, change sequence, sensitive communication, measurement and governance. Plus nine printable pocket tools.