Why Your Research Communication Plan Shouldn't Start With a List of Deliverables
If you've ever been presented with a communication plan that looked like a shopping list – six blog posts, a monthly newsletter, social media three times a week, a policy brief at the end of the project – you're not alone. This is how a lot of research communication gets planned. And it's understandable why.
When a project needs to scope its communication activities, someone has to put numbers on things. How many outputs? What type? How often? These are reasonable questions to ask, and answering them early makes budgeting and planning easier. Communication consultants and agencies often lead with deliverables because that's what clients expect, and because it's how proposals get written and approved.
The problem isn't that deliverables don't matter. They do. The problem is when they come first, before anyone has asked what the research is actually trying to achieve, who needs to hear about it, or what communication needs to do to support the project's goals. When that happens, the deliverables become the plan rather than the outcome of the plan. And communication that isn't connected to clear goals tends to produce activity without impact.
What happens when you start with deliverables
A communication plan built around outputs rather than outcomes tends to share a few characteristics.
The content gets produced on schedule, but doesn't build toward anything. Blog posts go out. Newsletters get sent. Social media ticks along. But because the plan was never anchored to specific audiences or specific goals, it's hard to know whether any of it is working, or even what "working" would look like.
Audiences get treated as an afterthought. When the deliverables are decided before the audiences are identified, the content ends up being written for no one in particular. It covers the research without connecting it to the people who need to understand it or the decisions it could inform.
The budget gets spent on the wrong things. A project that allocates most of its communication budget to social media management because "everyone does social media" may find that, at the end, its key audience – fisheries policymakers, say, or coastal community groups – wasn't on those platforms and didn't see any of it.
Impact is impossible to demonstrate. If you didn't define what success looked like at the start, you can't show it at the end. This is increasingly a problem as funders ask harder questions about communication outcomes.
None of this is anyone's fault. It's a structural problem. The way projects get scoped and approved creates pressure to commit to deliverables early, before the strategic thinking has been done. But it's worth pushing back on that pressure where you can.
A better starting point
The alternative isn't to avoid planning deliverables but to arrive at them differently.
Instead of starting with what you'll produce, start with three questions:
What is the research trying to achieve? Not just academically. What real-world change is it working toward? A shift in policy, a change in practice, increased public understanding, better-informed decisions? Being specific about this changes everything that follows.
What role does communication play in that? Communication is rarely the whole solution. It's one part of a larger system of change. Understanding what communication can realistically contribute keeps your strategy focused and your expectations honest.
Who needs to know what, and when? Different audiReach out and start a conversationences need different things at different points in the research process. Mapping this out before you think about content means your deliverables emerge from a genuine understanding of who you're trying to reach and what they need, rather than from a template.
Once you can answer these questions, the deliverables follow naturally. They might still involve widespread social media, but they might also involve more targeted, more purposeful communication that is more likely to reach the people who need to see it most.
This approach takes a little more time at the planning stage. But it prevents resources being wasted – and helps ensure that your research is more likely to make some sort of impact.
Where deliverables fit
To be clear: deliverables matter. Funders need to know what they're funding. Project teams need to know what they're responsible for. Partners need to know what to expect. Indeed, a communication plan without clear outputs isn't a plan. It's more a set of intentions.
The point is not to avoid committing to deliverables, but to arrive at them through a process that starts with goals and audiences rather than templates and assumptions. The deliverables should be the last decision in the planning process, not the first.
If you're at the proposal stage of a research project and want to think through what a goals-first communication plan might look like, Ocean Oculus can help. And if you're mid-project and realising your communication plan is more shopping list than strategy, it's not too late to course-correct. Reach out and start a conversation.
