A visual communication audit is an important tool for expressing your core values to your target audiences.
Just hearing the word “audit” can bring a shiver to your spine. According to Wikipedia, the core meaning of audit is, “an evaluation of a person, organization, system, process, enterprise, project or product.” We could soften this to “examination,” but I think evaluation and critical assessment are exactly what any organization needs to do when embarking on a new or revised communication program.
Katlin Smith, Principal of UrbanWords Group, a public relations firm in Seattle, provided these tips for a communication audit:
An effective Communications Audit will identify:
• how past communications were handled
• key audiences, what they currently know about your business, service, product or organization, what they need and want to know and how they prefer to be reached
• strengths and weaknesses in current communications programs
• untapped opportunities for future communications
A Communications Audit asks:
• What are our current goals and objectives for communications?
• How well is the current Communications Plan working?
• Are our messages clear and consistent? Do we have a coordinated graphic identity?
• Are we reaching key audiences with our messages and moving them to action?
• What communications have been most effective?
• What do customers think of our communications?
• Do our communications support our overall strategic plan for our business or organization?
• What would make our communications more effective in the future?
• What communications opportunities are we missing?
A visual communication audit is an important tool for companies who want to know how well they are expressing their core values to their target audiences. In Brand Identity Essentials by Kevin Budelman, Yang Kim and Curt Wozniak (Rockport), the authors remind us that, “the identity should be represented in a consistent way across all media and under different constraints—and resist temptations to vary it.”
How do you do an audit?
First, Langton Cherubino Group looks at what media is used and where you communicate. “The design consultant must fully understand the visual environment in which a design must perform.” Says Veronica Napoles in Corporate Identity Design (Van Nostrand Reinhold). We review online, in print and in the physical world. We review samples from website pages, social media, video, advertising, signage, exhibits, company publications, direct mail, email marketing, publications, annual reports, and internal and external communications. We like to post all of your communication samples on a wall to review the visual components that express a brand to the public.
We are looking for visual patterns and trends. We are examining the messaging expressed through language and image. We want to see how your communication materials talk about your company. Do the materials that represent a company speak the same language, do they use a common tone? How do the different departments, associates, specialties and initiatives connect back to the parent brand? Is it consistent or do they fight with one another? Does the naming system of the logo clarify or confused the audience? What audiences overlap, which are specific to an individual project or initiative within the company? “The communication audit examines how the organization talks and listens,” says Wally Olins in Corporate Identity (Harvard Business School Press). And Olins adds, “to whom.” Knowing who an organization is speaking to and how it represents itself to its public is important.
Who benefits from an audit?
We have conducted visual communication audits for many clients from large organizations like Pfizer where we reviewed all the wellness and employee communications programs for “Healthy Pfizer” to nonprofit organizations like Koinonia, A Lutheran spiritual center that was rebranding to prepare for a new capital campaign to financial service organizations like Renaissance Capital and Olstein Capital Management who were upgrading their logo and creating new powerful brands. The communications audit can lay the essential groundwork for a new identity. By seeing how the existing communications are being handled, you can prepare an identity system that addresses the company’s real communication vehicles.
