Advanced Certificate in Comms Planning

This certification is available for Members ONLY and consists of 45 hours of online learning split across five modules, taking place over seven months.

Participants must pass an assessment at the end of each module to achieve the Certificate; three essays and two multiple choice quizzes.

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL 3-5 years experience
Anyone involved in developing and planning communication strategies for clients and brands. It’s a sweet spot for mid-level practitioners.

The online content has been split into five learning paths, designed to provide a high-level and end-to-end understanding of communications strategy planning.

Module 1: The Media Context for Comms Planning – This module provides much of the context for the qualification. It revisits the cultural importance of media; how media agencies make money; and considers how major technology shifts and consumer reactions to them have impacted the way we plan. It then explores how these changes and reactions continue to impact not only media industry thinking but also agency delivery and development.

Module 2: Designing and Implementing Effective Measurement – This module will help you identify what you should be evaluating, and why, before embarking on any new strategic development. It gives a range of best practice methods for evaluating different types of activity and brings these concepts to life using IPA Effectiveness Award examples and an outline evaluation framework.

Module 3: Developing a Communications Strategy – This module guides you through each stage of communication strategy planning, the importance of a good brief, setting a budget; defining a customer/ target audience, gathering insight and developing ideas. The module highlights successful industry techniques and evidences them through the use of influential and industry-leading content.

Module 4: Approaches to Integration – This module discusses what we know about both the meaning and importance of how channels work together and also integration models – drawing from IPA publications including ‘Datamine 3’ and the works of Peter Field and Les Binet. You are challenged to voice your own thinking around the topic, with the opportunity to use selected IPA Effectiveness Award-winning papers as a basis for discussion.

Module 5: Principles and Practices for a Great Comms Plan – The final module covers the remaining steps to developing a communications plan – the role for media and channel choices. It focuses primarily on two key deliverables: (1) The ‘Ecosystem’, a holistic view of all touchpoints and content 4 and (2) The ‘Schematic’, a breakdown of investment by touchpoint and how that investment will be phased. This module shows how you can maximise the effectiveness of your communications plan through best practice principles for budget allocation and channel planning, and, once a plan goes live, through ongoing analysis and optimisation.