Communications Systems Diagnostic
A printable writing exercise for organizations whose communications have become scattered, reactive, difficult to maintain, or overly dependent on individual people.
Built for municipalities, public institutions, cultural organizations, museums, nonprofits, associations, communications teams, and organizations where communications work is being handled without a formal department.
What communications problem keeps coming back?
The newsletter is late. The website is outdated. The same request arrives three different ways. Nobody is completely certain who approves what. One person seems to know how everything works, which means everyone feels it when that person is gone.
The problem looks small until it happens again.
Routine communications keep becoming urgent.
Requests arrive through too many informal routes.
Public information is difficult to keep current.
Approval is unclear, slow, or dependent on someone who is already overloaded.
The work stops or slows when one person is unavailable.
Twelve questions. Five parts of the communications system.
There is no score to chase. The point is to notice recurrence: where work depends on memory, workarounds, informal decisions, or one person holding too much of the system.
Responsibility
Who prepares, approves, publishes, and follows through.
Flow
How requests, decisions, information, and approvals move.
Reach
Where information lives and whether the right people actually see it.
Maintenance
What keeps public information accurate after it is published.
Continuity
Whether the work can continue through absence, change, or pressure.
You do not need a communications department to have a communications system.
Communication may sit with a formal department, one staff member, leadership, program staff, an outside vendor, or several people across the organization.
The diagnostic works either way. It looks at how the work is actually getting done now: who is carrying it, when they are brought in, where information goes, how decisions are made, and what happens when the usual person is not available.
If two people answer differently, keep both answers.
The disagreement may tell you that the process is not as visible or shared as everyone assumes.
This is a writing exercise.
Most communications work happens on screens while messages, tabs, meetings, and deadlines compete for attention.
Printing the diagnostic and writing through it by hand creates a different kind of attention. It gives you enough room to see patterns that are easy to move past during the normal workday.
What communications problem keeps coming back?
Download the Communications Systems Diagnostic.
Print it, work through the twelve questions, and pay attention to the places where the same weakness shows up more than once.
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