Communications Plan

At the Annual Meeting in Jacksonville, an update to the Communications Strategy was approved by the Governing Board. This update calls for the Secretary’s Department to “formulate and implement an overall Communications Plan for USPS”. It also calls for each department and committee to define the communications capabilities required to meet the goals of the Strategic Plan. In addition to the specific language of the strategy, the Planning Committee passed along a list of suggestions/recommendations.

The members of the national bridge of the Canadian Power Squadron were also in attendance at Jacksonville. In a discussion with Catherine McLeod, National Secretary of CPS we learned that CPS had addressed the communications question with the establishment of a Communications Committee with components at the national, district, and squadron levels. Catherine was kind enough to provide documentation on how the CPS system works. This committee was established in 2002, so it has had five years to work out problems.

Projects are often slow getting started while the team members search for ways to express their thoughts on the problem to be solved and potential solutions. Quite often, real progress begins when a proposal is made and the team is asked to evaluate it. Rather than dealing with abstract ideas, the team has a real proposal where they can point out problems and make revisions or scrap the whole concept.

With that in mind, we would like to suggest that we adapt the CPS Communications Committee structure to USPS to address our communications needs.

1. Utilizing the documents provided by CPS put together a USPS version.
2. Distribute the document to the departments and committees to determine whether the proposal will meet their needs.
3. Evaluate the feedback.
4. Define an implementation plan.
5. Review the plan.
6. Make it happen.

Step one exists in a PowerPoint presentation on the web at http://www.usps.org/national/natsec/communications/comm_plan.pps . We would like each department and committee to review the plan and provide feedback in time for the June OCOM meeting. We would also like to have the name of an individual who will represent the interests of department/committee.