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City of San Leandro – Strategic Communications Plan | 15 issue which could generate media interest or which would be of interest to a somewhat broad group of residents, business owners or visitors. The brief document uses a bullet format to note audiences, messages, tactics, timeline, responsibilities and budget. Provide key messages and issue summaries to City Council. A common refrain from internal and external audiences interviewed for this Plan indicate a high level of word-of-mouth transmission of information throughout the community, especially via current and past City Council members. Ensuring these important community/opinion leaders may easily convey the most important information about all significant City programs, services and projects requires the adoption of a key message development program and dissemination to elected and appointed officials. Conduct presentation training for management staff. Management personnel should undergo regular presentation training to incorporate best practices into their internal and external presentations to better inform audiences, improve their organization’s credibility, and motivate audiences to take a desired action. A group staff training session that provides presentation basics can be supported by separate individual training sessions that incorporate a mock presentation with individualized feedback. Adopt a “beat” structure for the public information team if/as staff is built up (see organizational recommendations later in this Plan). Adopting a “beat structure” to assist and counsel each City Department in their communications needs is an excellent goal to consider, should the City be able to grow the internal staff resources. Staff members of the Public Information Office would be assigned to a City department to serve as a communications counselor. Regular meetings are held with Department management and communication staff liaison to understand goals and issues. Department-wide as well as project- specific communications plans would be prepared by Department staff with the assistance of the PIO staff or prepared by the communications manager. This enables the professional communications staff to become familiar with the staff and issues in each Department and to operate as an in-house public relations counseling firm. The appendix of this Plan includes a model approach, now in place in the City of Carlsbad. “Personal Touch” / Opinion Leader Communications Programming – Engage residents by adopting tactics that bring all together to learn and exchange information about City programs, issues, and decisions. Identify and inform key opinion and community leaders by category, such as City Commissioners, parents, visitors or business organization leaders/participants, school leaders, faith-based leaders/participants, etc. A unifying trait to engage with these individuals is personalized attention; tactics focusing on this “personal touch” will be most effective. 3 Engage residents at their neighborhood level through in-home/small group/topic specific gatherings. Holding hyper-local neighborhood meetings about area-specific or citywide topics has the benefit of engaging residents in ways that larger “town hall” meetings do not. When neighbors gather in their home or nearby facility, such as a church or HOA meeting room, to hear from a City representative about an important topic, many benefits ensue: attendees do not come with the mindset of “taking on” the City or “us” versus “them,” but come with a more moderate view of coming to listen, gather information and share opinions. This is a vastly different mindset than attending a City-sponsored “community meeting” where views often build on group agitation. This tactic is being adopted throughout the state with excellent results. The challenge is that these take considerable time to find hosts and organize, but the benefits are significant. Systematize homeowner association leadership briefings/populate HOA communications channels. The leaders of the homeowner associations in San Leandro are important opinion sources and shape the views of not only those who reside in their communities but also throughout the city. Quarterly or twice-yearly briefings of the HOA leadership, placing content in the HOA newsletters, and making presentations at the HOA annual/ regular meetings will provide a “personal touch” type of connection to important audiences. Provide more consistent content of interest to parents through the School District. Parents of children attending school in San Leandro are key audiences, as are the youth served. Rather than relying on the news media and/or creating new channels, inserting messages and content into existing tools produced by the District and