Internal Communications Plan Template (+ Example)

What is an internal communications plan?

In our opinion, an internal communications plan is meant to work with or as a specific initiative; it could be a key part of a larger, public rollout, or its own internal campaign entirely.

This plan helps you create a strong outline of how you’re going to segment your audience, develop targeted messaging, and use specific channels to achieve targeted business results. It helps you get a more high-level view of the messages you’re going to send, and is also incredibly useful for articulating the basics to your leadership team and getting everyone on the same page.

An internal communications strategy might be entirely different, and may be less about one specific initiative and more about the overall purpose and cadence of internal communications within the business. Your strategy might be more about establishing norms for group communication, how you’ll roll out all-company news, what channels work best for your employees, or tying comms in with a specific business initiative (like recruiting new hires or generating more revenue). We don’t recommend this particular template for that use case, but we’ll develop a template for that soon!

Ultimately, your internal communications plan should communicate the basics: who, what, where, when, and how (and who owns it). Our template is simple and effective, and should do the trick as you work through things like product launches, benefits updates, mergers & acquisitions, or other large-scale changes to the business. (In our sample template, we walk through a communications plan for informing employees about a shift to hybrid work, for example.)