I was excited when I saw the title of a recent blog, that Matt Fenwick, Founder of True North Content had written, called The Northstar Framework: A Guide for Smarter Communications Decisions.

It’s a fairly common scenario for a lot of comms professionals and I know I’ve certainly been in this position loads of times. I’m either stuck with a bunch of ideas, and don’t know which ones to go with, or I’ve got a plan all set and then, one random morning, after the boss or a client has read a blog or listened to a podcast, they get all excited and say, “Hey, we should be doing this new ABC or XYZ thing!”.

Maybe it’s TikTok or Vine or whatever the kids are into. And that latter one is hard because they are the boss or the client and they are all excited but, deep down, you know it isn’t a good idea. But how do you say, “No” or, better still, how do you give the idea some air and work towards a smart decision of ‘yes’ or ‘no’?

The reason I was excited when I saw Matt’s blog, The Northstar Framework: A Guide for Smarter Communications Decisions, was because I’d sort of toyed with the same type of idea, a flow chart/decision process/matrix to help us work through deciding whether we should use a marketing tactic or not.

I, however, had never given it any serious bandwidth to try and figure out. So, I was happy when I saw that Matt had done all the work for us all and, to be fair, he’s done a better job than I probably would have!