Introduction
In effort to communicate with its audiences effectively, the Florida Sod Growers Cooperative (FSGC) approached the PIE Center with interest in conducting a communications audit. The goal of a communications audit is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s communications practices internally within the organization as well as externally among its stakeholders.
The PIE Center requested and received a representative sampling of materials used by the FSGC, including newsletters, brochures, press releases and audio files. The materials, along with the website and social media, were reviewed and analyzed for consistency, usability, messaging strategies and effectiveness.
Key findings
Although the FSGC website displayed a large logo, link to Facebook and content tailored to members, various stylistic problems limited the site’s effectiveness and professional appearance. Multiple fonts, colors, shading, shapes and bold text created a disjointed appearance. The lack of consistency and absence of an “About” page to explain the history, mission, vision, goals and objectives made it difficult for the site to maintain a strong brand identity.
FSGC’s consumer website, floridalawn.com, featured a stronger color scheme and well-organized sidebars and titles. The overall educational messages seemed to fit the consumer audience and weren’t overly technical.
Although FSGC operates a Facebook page, the affiliation to the organization was not abundantly clear because the logo does not appear anywhere on the page. In addition, the page only had 54 likes, illustrating the potential lack of recognition. Although the content appeared to be updated, the organization had only liked 12 other pages, indicating that FSGC had not created a community with other related groups.
The Florida Lawn printed publication had strong readability and some good design qualities, but lacked the presence of the organization’s mission and vision statements as well as information about social media. Similar branding problems were noticed in other publications, e-newsletters, memos and the website.
Recommendations
In an effort to secure and promote the FSGC brand, it is essential that the cooperative implement a consistent color scheme and use it with all communication materials. Additionally, not all the reviewed materials explicitly stated the mission and vision of FSGC. Therefore, a boilerplate statement about the organization should be created and included in all communication material when possible.
To ensure consistency, the PIE Center suggested that FSGC create an identity guide for all communication materials. The guide will establish a design protocol for when any new material is created, including brochures or additional pages to the website. It specifies requirements for logo placement, colors to represent the cooperative, which fonts to use for headlines and body text, as well as any other specifications the organization wishes to use.
FSGC should cross-promote the cooperative and consumer websites to increase traffic and build audiences. Both sites should feature a page with the mission and vision of the cooperative to increase brand identity. Overall stylistic changes, such as defining a link color that matches the color scheme or centering content online would modernize the site format.
As the Florida Sod Growers Cooperative, all communications should refrain from the use of “turf.” The organization should not further the confusion about the difference between sod and turf by using the terms interchangeably. This also establishes FSGC as separate from the Florida Turfgrass Association.
As FSGC seeks to increase effective communication, the organization should increase its presence in social media, specifically Facebook. The small number of likes suggests the page is not successfully promoting the brand and mission. After updating and enhancing the page, FGSC should promote its Facebook presence on its website, printed materials and any other method. To create content, the cooperative should use various writing techniques to encourage education and possible behavioral change or action with consumers and elected officials.
