A strong foundation to underpin our education, training, publicity and campaigning activity

Our message is an important one, with the potential to save lives, reduce pain and suffering, and make our community a safer place to live and work. However, we acknowledge that ours is one of many voices competing for the attention of the public. It is crucial, therefore, that we meet people where they are, rather than expect them to conform to our traditional pattern of outreach. This means that our communications activity must be accessible, relevant, informative, interesting and easy to understand. To achieve this, we will:

• Revise and maintain our equality of access protocol, ensuring that everyone, regardless of age, disability, race, religion, belief, gender, sex or sexual preference, can access our information and services

• Publish an annual calendar for our campaigning and community engagement activities, in line with local priorities and key messages, regional and national campaigns (via NPCC, Highways England, THINK!, Brake etc)

• Develop a community engagement protocol to determine what resources we commit to public events, governed by pre-agreed criteria and subject to evaluation

• Introduce a robust evaluation programme on all our activity to allow us to see what is successful and what requires change, and provide opportunities to learn from our experiences

• Review our suite of existing interventions to see if they are meeting their objectives, and revise them accordingly

A robust communications framework to govern what we say, who we say it to and how we say it

Our key messages should be embedded in all our activity, and they should be easy to identify and clear to understand. It is also important that our messages are consistent across our channels and platforms. To achieve the aims of this strategy, we intend to deliver:

• An agreed suite of key messages

• A list of target audiences for those messages

• A rolling plan on how to engage these audiences

Underpinning this activity, we will endeavour to create informative, useful and easy to access content which is both consistent and engaging. To achieve this, we will:

• Adopt a style guide to ensure consistency of messages, language and presentation across all channels

• Revise our branding guidelines and introduce standards that govern our publicity, ensuring a professional standard across the board

• Develop our tone of voice and ‘corporate personality’ so that we remain a trusted and accessible source of advice, help and training