What are the 5 steps in communication planning?

The way businesses send branded text messages has changed.

From 1 July 2026, businesses and organisations that send branded SMS using a sender ID must register that sender ID under the ACMA’s SMS Sender ID Register, or their messages may be labelled “Unverified”. The rule was announced months in advance through ACMA and government guidance.

Any organisation still scrambling to register this week skipped the first and most basic discipline in the profession: planning the communication before the deadline forces your hand.

That is the lesson. Communication planning is not a document you write once a problem has already surfaced. It is a five-step sequence, repeated for every campaign, policy change, or regulatory shift an organisation faces. Skip a step and the gap shows up later, possibly in a headline you did not choose.

Every credible plan starts with an honest read of the current position. What do stakeholders already believe? What is changing in the regulatory or competitive environment? What has already been said publicly that you will now need to be consistent with?

This is where a journalism background earns its keep. A newsroom editor does not start with the press release. They start by asking what story is actually developing, and whether the organisation has noticed it yet. The ACMA sender ID register is a useful test case. It was flagged well in advance, which means any business still caught out failed at research, not execution.

Organisations that treat this stage seriously build it into ongoing issues management, tracking regulatory and reputational signals before they harden into deadlines nobody planned for.

Once the situation is understood, the plan needs a defined outcome. Not “raise awareness,” which means nothing to a board, but a specific, measurable result: full sender ID registration by a set date, a defined shift in stakeholder sentiment, or a named reduction in customer complaints.

Vague objectives produce vague plans. Consequently, the communications function ends up reacting to whatever the loudest stakeholder demands that week, rather than working toward something the organisation actually chose.

A plan built for “the public” is not a plan. Customers, regulators, employees, investors, and media each need the same message, but with different wording or emphasis, delivered through a different channel, on a different timeline. A regulator wants evidence of compliance. A customer wants to know their information is safe. An employee wants to know what changes for them personally.

This is where the three-message framework earns its place: the incident message covers the facts and the timeline, the company message covers values and commitment, and the personal message, where a leader is involved, covers what they genuinely feel and intend to do about it.

Mapping the audience first tells you which of the three actually needs to be heard, and by whom.

With research done, objectives set, and audiences mapped, the actual message gets built. Here, the 3Cs still hold: clear, concise, consistent. Every channel should carry the same core message, adapted in tone but never in substance.

This is also where Trust = Truth + Transparency + Traceability becomes practical rather than theoretical. Your history is traceable in seconds now. A message built on a claim that does not match the record will be found and published faster than you can correct it. Strategy, at this stage, means choosing the truth you are prepared to stand behind publicly, not the version that sounds best in the boardroom.

A plan that is never tested against reality is a document, not a discipline. Execution means the message actually reaches the mapped audiences, through the right channels, on the agreed timeline. Evaluation means checking, afterward, whether the objectives set in step two were actually met.

Most organisations execute reasonably well. Fewer go back and evaluate honestly. That is precisely where the discipline of ongoing reputation management separates organisations that improve with each cycle from those that repeat the same avoidable mistakes.

Boards and general counsel who want this built in permanently, rather than reassembled from scratch every time a deadline like the ACMA register appears, tend to work through Wilkinson Confidante, where the planning cycle runs continuously rather than in response to the next crisis.

None of this is complicated in theory. What separates organisations that execute it well from those still registering sender IDs in the final week is judgment: knowing which signals matter, which stakeholders to prioritise, and which truths need to be said out loud before someone else says them first. That judgment tends to come from people who have sat in a newsroom asking what the real story is, not just from a communications team following a template. My own approach to this, shaped by three decades in journalism before crisis and reputation work, is set out on my background page.

If in doubt about whether to plan the communication now or wait for the deadline to force it, plan it now. The organisations that treat these five steps as a standing discipline are rarely the ones explaining themselves after the fact.