A Guide to Crafting an Effective Comms Campaign Strategy & Plan
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About this Guide
Structuring your internal communications campaign correctly from the start is critical if you want to understand the true impact of comms—across all the types of things you communicate.
But in a business environment defined by constant transformation, the ability to navigate change successfully is crucial for organizational resilience and growth. Given how often IC teams communicate about change-related things, this template looks at campaign structure through the lens of change comms, but is equally applicable to other types of campaigns.
When it comes to change—organizational restructuring, implementing new technologies, redefining corporate culture, or simply getting employees to adopt a new process—effectively communicating is crucial to achieving organizational goals. However, many companies find
it challenging to engage employees and stakeholders throughout this process, risking confusion and resistance.
To lay the groundwork for successful transformation, communicators must develop a well-crafted campaign plan that aligns employees and stakeholders with organizational goals, builds trust and transparency, and reinforces desired behaviors.
These templates aim to provide a clear framework for creating a powerful communication campaign that not only conveys critical information but also motivates and unites your workforce around change.
Use these templates to clearly define your change campaign goals and audience, identify what success looks like for your campaign, and develop a channel plan to clearly communicate with your target audience.
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The Internal Communications Measurement Masterclass & Playbook
Internal communicators measure plenty. Open rates, click-throughs, attendance, views, and reach—most IC teams have dashboards full of the stuff. What they struggle with is proving that any of it made a difference to the business. And business impact is the only measurement their leaders genuinely care about. It's a gap most IC practitioners feel acutely. Gallagher's 2026 Employee Communications Report found that seven in 10 internal communicators still measure only basic activity metrics, and fewer than one in eight measure business impact. Measurement is the weakest capability in their global readiness model, and teams relying only on activity data are the ones struggling most to demonstrate their value. This is a two-part guide built to close that gap. Part One is the Masterclass. It sets out why outcome measurement matters, the frameworks that make it manageable, and the principles separating measurement that proves impact from measurement that just fills a dashboard. Part Two is the Playbook. It's the templates, the worked example, and the sample dashboard—the practical tools you'll need for a successful comms campaign. Read the Masterclass for the thinking. The Playbook is where you'll find the tools to put it into practice. We hope you find them useful. Tim Vaughan Editorial Director, Poppulo
The Internal Communications Measurement Masterclass & Playbook—Part Two: The Playbook
Many IC teams measure and report on what's easy to count: email open rates, video views, all-hands attendances. Outputs that leadership don’t much care about. They want to know whether communications actually changed anything—whether people understood something important and whether behavior looked different afterward. Leaders want proof of impact, they want to see results. Outputs don't give them that. Outcomes do. Part One of this paper, the Measurement Masterclass, clearly showed why. Here, Part Two gives you the tools to measure outcomes: four templates you can fill in for your own campaigns, plus a full worked example showing all four completed together, so you can see how they fit before you use them yourself. What’s inside: The Know/Feel/Do Framework. Defines what a specific audience needs to know, feel, and do as a result of your communication—specific enough to measure. One template per audience segment. The Outcome/Output/Measurement Plan. For each outcome, sets out the communication tactic you'll use and how you'll measure whether it worked. This is the template you'll use most. The SMART Objectives Worksheet. A short exercise for turning a vague goal into a specific, measurable one, with a number and a deadline attached. The Power/Influence Grid. Maps your audience by power and attitude—champions, supporters, blockers, detractors—so you know where to put your effort. A worked example. All four templates completed end-to-end for a company-wide AI policy rollout, so you can see the whole process applied to one campaign from start to finish. A sample measurement dashboard. A one-page example of how to present outcome data to leadership. Written by Andrew Hubbard, Senior Director of Communications at Poppulo, and Joanna Hall of Afire Consulting.
The AI Toolkit for Internal Communications
Internal communication is under real pressure. IC teams are expected to support leaders, shape culture, and deliver relevant, personalized communication to an increasingly diverse audience—all while operating at greater speed and scale than ever before. AI arrives at the right moment. It doesn’t replace communicators; it elevates them. Applied well, AI sharpens the fundamentals of effective communication: diagnosing issues, shaping the narrative, guiding leaders, and delivering messages that connect people to purpose and progress. At its best, AI accelerates drafting, adapts content for different formats, improves accessibility, and surfaces insights about what’s landing. Without governance, though, it can create noise or risk. The opportunity for IC teams is to bring AI in thoughtfully, with governance and human judgment at the center. This guide shows how to do exactly that. Inside, you’ll find practical guidance on when to use AI, where humans remain essential, how to establish guardrails, how to prompt effectively, and how to scale AI responsibly across channels and teams.