3 types of tools every communicator needs in their tech stack

You can’t build a house without the right tools. The same is true of an internal comms strategy. Not every company is the same and not every tech stack will look the same, but some archetypal tools can help any communicator make their work more efficient.

That process doesn’t happen overnight, though — it takes a lot of testing and tinkering to figure out what fits.

“You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive,” said Elizabeth Clements, vice president of university communications at DePaul University. ”The same goes for any new communications tool.”

Here are three types of tool every communicator needs.

The planning tool

Any communicator worth their salt has a comprehensive content plan for the weeks and months ahead of them. Doing that requires a dynamic editorial calendar and planning tool.

Clements told Ragan that her team uses the Monday.com platform because it allows her colleagues in other departments to see what her team has in the hopper and how to support it.

“It was really important for us to have an editorial calendar where people — not only like our staff within my team — can have access to it, but that people from other departments can be able to view or add things as well,” she said. “Something cloud-based and shareable like that is really important for us, especially when you have a complex editorial calendar.”

Clements added that a multifunctional planning tool helps her team stay on top of where projects stand — that’s particularly helpful when you’re creating messaging for multiple leaders and audiences at the same time.

“It’s been really helpful for all kinds of things, from an editorial calendar to even tracking our communications plan — like our annual strategic plan for the year,” she said. “It also has metrics that allow you to see your progress, like what’s completed and what you still need to do.”

The AI tool

Erika Hermanson, director of communications at Providence Swedish North Puget Sound, said that a proprietary GPT helps her team through the ideation stage of message creation.

“It helps us at least develop our first good, D-minus-level first drafts of things because there’s so much need for comms,” she said. “To be able to have a tool that can easily create a rough first draft that we can then modify with a much better lead and much better information is really helpful.”

Hermanson gave an example of creating an internal blog post on a new leader starting at her organization as a prime use of AI drafting to save time and create baseline content.

“I’d go into AI and say, ‘Please give me a first draft of an article for a new leader and give me a good first draft,” she said. “I can then go in and polish it and give it more color. That way I don’t have to start from scratch.”

The collaboration tool

Internal comms is often a complex operation — and one that happens across large companies and disparate locations. The right tools can help bring teams together to work in concert. Hermanson provided the example of her team’s use of Firstup to unify colleagues across seven states when working on projects, especially newsletters that need to be shared internally.

“Every Tuesday we have an editorial meeting where we go through the top stories that we need to share with our caregivers, our employees and our core leaders who are managers,” she said. “Our teams can go into that article and then say yes, we want this to be served to our channel of caregivers in the North Puget Sound because it applies to them. Or we could switch it off so that it’s not accessible.”

She added that the tool helps her comms team work in a way that turns a dispersed team into an efficient group of content creators

“It just helps us be able to have this news wire kind of operation,” she said. “Our newsletter publishers can just access it and create newsletters easily every week.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.