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Introduction

Site: TRU Open Courses
Course: OL Course Development
Book: Introduction
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Date: Sunday, 12 April 2026, 7:44 PM

Table of contents

Overview

This course is primarily an applied skills course, providing an opportunity to enhance your strategic communication techniques through a progressive project. As you engage the steps of the course scenario, you are guided to build skills in planning and implementing a variety of communication projects, mindful of the importance of strategic goals, audience engagement, and effective writing and document design.

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A woman, typing by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash

This section will introduce the concept of strategic communication and provide an overview of the course scenario.

Topics

  • What Is Strategic Communication?

  • Course Scenario Overview

What Is Strategic Communication?

Defining the Concepts

LESSON

Welcome to the first content lesson in this course. You might think about these as the equivalent of the “lecture” element of this course. The focus will be on emphasizing the key learning ideas and supporting you as you complete the course readings and activities.

So, what does strategic communication mean?

Any time you communicate in a professional setting, you will always be thinking about positioning and goal. What do you need to achieve with the act of communication? And what choices can you make in how, when, and with whom you communicate to reach that goal? Communication is often reactive, as communicators default to easy or traditional patterns; a strategic communicator is proactive, knows their goal, assesses the current environment, and takes the most advantageous position within that environment.

Beyond simply improving your writing, this course is about being able to achieve specific goals through communication in whatever professional context you’re working in. And the underlying assumption here is that it doesn’t really matter how great your ideas or projects are if you can’t cut through to your audience with effective strategy.

READ

Begin by reading three short sections from Ohio State University’s OER, Writing for Strategic Communication Industries, written by Jasmine Roberts-Crews (2016). Read Chapter 1: “Defining Strategic Communication” subchapters on “What is strategic communication,” “Five tenets of strategic communication,” and “Skills needed in the strategic communication profession.”

THINK and ENGAGE

As you complete the readings above, make a note of the following:

  1. How do Hallahan et al. (2007) define strategic communication? What do they mean by “purposeful”?

  2. Using the quote from Paul (2011) and other content, explain in your own words why this communication is strategic.

  3. For each of the five tenets, make a note of personal or social examples where one or more of the tenets was not followed; this is often an easier way to judge the importance of these five elements.

  4. Review the skills listed in the reading. Given your own professional goals and your current skills sets, which skills do you think you need to really focus on? And which ones will be salient for your professional success?

Positioning

LESSON

At a personal level, we are all masters of strategic communication because we know what we want to accomplish, and we can easily figure out how to make our goals seem valuable to those around us. Think, for example, of a time in which you convinced someone close to you to do an activity that you really wanted to do; how did you convince them or make it worth their while? Professionally, it’s sometimes more difficult to make these connections between our communication goals and the needs of our audiences; it takes more work to figure it out.

Strategic communication means providing messages and sometimes generating action in the interests of a particular position. That position can be very local or very general: the needs of a brand engaging their market; the needs of a manager motivating their team; or the needs of a colleague proposing a new project. Every act of communication is calculated, working from the position of some individual or group hoping to achieve their goals.

But we don’t communicate in a vacuum. Our goals might not be universally shared. We must also be aware of how different audiences might respond to the position we write from. The more aware we are of audience needs and their disposition towards us and our goals, the better we will be able to craft effective messages.

How do you write and produce to engage an audience while advancing the interests of the group within which you’re positioned? We will practise doing this in this course.

READ

Now read the article “How Your Organization Can Build Trust in 2020” (Gianforti, 2020), and as you read, answer the questions in the “Think and Engage” box below.

THINK and ENGAGE

As you read the article “How Your Organization Can Build Trust in 2020,” consider the following questions:

  1. What is the History Factory and what services to they offer?

  2. What problem or challenge does the article articulate?

  3. What solutions are offered?

  4. How is research incorporated into this article?

  5. What techniques do they use to the “tell the story” of each of their five points?

  6. Looking at the end of the article, how does this article strategically communicate the interests of the History Factory organization? How are they positioned in this communication? In what ways do they link their goals to their audience need?

Course Scenario Overview

Progressive Project

LESSON

When clients, like government ministries or corporations, are looking for someone to complete a project as a contract, they will often put out a request for proposals, or RFP. This common professional document outlines the client’s expectations and requirements for a project, enabling potential consultants to submit their proposal for how they would complete the project. If they win and their proposals are accepted, then they get to complete the project they outlined in their proposal.

This course is structured around a simplified and hypothetical version of this process. Students are given a Request for Proposals which outlines the expectations and requirements for the course project. Based on this, students produce a proposal, and then go on to research and write a policy brief and a communications package to share their work with different audiences. These documents are thus connected as a single, progressive multi-step project.

For students registered in CMNS 3241, each stage of the project corresponds to a graded term assignment:

  • Project Proposal (20%)—You will submit a proposal to conduct research that meets specific goals and criteria. These goals and criteria will be provided in the assignment.

  • Policy Brief (25%)—You will then complete the actual “research” paper that you proposed in the Project Proposal assignment. A policy brief is a type of research paper.

  • Communications Package (20%)—Finally, you will develop a plan and materials to mobilize the knowledge from your policy brief, with an emphasis on accessible forms of communication for different audiences, including an infographic, a community presentation, and a social media story.

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(c) Shannon Smyrl and TRU Open Learning CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

For those students being graded on their assessments, to be successful, it’s important that you complete everything in order, including the project tasks associated with each unit; these tasks build the skills you need to complete the unit assignments. Given the progressive nature of the course, students are encouraged to await instructor feedback before submitting subsequent assignments.

You will have the opportunity to study the Request for Proposals in the task at the end of this Introduction.

But first, let’s read through the course scenario to gain an idea of the kind of research you will be working on in this course.

Scenario: Call for Research to Inform Policy Development around Issues of Flexible Work

LESSON

We will use the following scenario to guide our work through the course. Note that this scenario is realistic in its intent, but somewhat simplified for the purposes of this course project:

Course Scenario

Flexible Work: Issues, Opportunities, and Risks

Many economic, social, and cultural factors combine today to raise diverse questions about the nature and feasibility of flexible work. Factors like increased automation, changing technology, remote/hybrid work opportunities, accessibility and equity issues, environmental challenges, and the instability of the gig economy are just some of the issues that pressure us, as a society, to rethink questions of flexibility and work. See Flexible Work Arrangements (Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, 2021) and Flexible Work Arrangements for Federally Regulated Employees (Government of Canada, 2025).

Focus/Scope

The impact of a changing world of flexible work is different for different groups, across fields and industries. Labour market impact might include questions of employment rates, job satisfaction, and productivity; economic impacts might include questions of growth, innovation, and competitiveness; and health and social impacts might include questions of balance, mental and physical health, and social values.

Perspective/Interest

But not everyone is affected by these issues in the same way. Many interest groups will have diverse views about the issues, risks, and opportunities related to flexible work; these interest groups include labour, small business, large organizations, non-profits, public interest groups, as well as segments of the population such as shift workers, working parents, and accessibility advocates.

Taking Action

Ministries within the BC provincial government are facing pressure to develop policy stances on a variety of issues related to the changing nature of work, including increasing opportunities to define and implement flexible work models. These policy stances might be needed across many different government portfolios, including economic development and innovation, labour, environment, health and social initiatives, and family development.

To support the development of policy stances across these areas, the government is soliciting research on the topic of flexible work and the potential issues, risks, and opportunities it represents across a range of sectors and interest groups. The goal is to gather arguments representative of a range of perspectives and interests on this issue across the region to inform future decision-making.

As such, the government will put out an RFP (request for proposals), asking for proposals to complete such research by submitting policy briefs and a communication plan to disseminate the information from the policy briefs.

Everything in the course will be linked to this scenario and your work to produce the communication documents requested. The first step will be to assess the Request for Proposals and begin to plan your Project Proposal assignment. To do this, you will be asked to start thinking about the perspective and focus you would like to take for your project; hints about that are suggested in the scenario. This work is outlined in your unit task below. (Note: For students of CMNS 3241, this unit task is graded.)

THINK and ENGAGE

To get you thinking about the scenario, take some time to read over some initial resources related to the topic of flexible work. These are general, and you will certainly find more specific and relevant ones for your own project as you begin to focus your interests.

Note: Some of these sources are open, and some may require paid access through an institutional library. For those engaging the course for interest, you may not be able to access all of these resources without an institutional pathway.

Orientation: What Is a Policy Brief?

The course scenario project really turns on the research and production of a policy brief. First you will focus on a specific topic and develop a proposal to write a policy brief, and then you will research and write the policy brief. After writing it, you will work on distributing the knowledge from that brief to larger audiences. Therefore, it would be helpful to look at some sample policy briefs, so you know what you are being asked to do!

In Unit 2, there are more developed lessons on the expectations, content, and form of policy briefs. For now, we will just have a general introduction to the genre. Your goal in this section is to read over some samples to get a feel for what you will be developing.

Policy briefs can take many forms, but essentially these are short (brief!) presentations of research and recommendations designed to inform decision-making about policy issues. The goal is a persuasive piece of research that works to convince decision-makers to shape policy in the interests or to the benefit of a particular group.

READ

To gain an initial understanding of a policy brief, explore the following resources, focusing specifically on looking at samples of policy briefs*:

  • The IDRC (International Development Research Centre, n.d.) document How to Write a Policy Brief includes links to several examples in the template section. Study the examples and we will return to this document in Unit 2 for applied practice.

  • UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research also has a library of sample Policy Briefs to examine. Choose two or three to read through, looking at the overall goal and structure of the documents.

*Remember, for the projects in this course, you will be using secondary research only. Many of these examples refer to primary research projects which are beyond our scope!

THINK and ENGAGE

To guide your examination of policy brief samples, consider these questions about a specific example: UC Davis’s “Social Safety Net Mitigates the Impact of Poverty on Brain Development and Mental Health” (Weissman et al., 2023).

  1. Whose interests are represented and advocated for in this policy brief?

  2. What recommendation is offered to inform policy development?

  3. What is the function of the Key Facts box? What can you learn there?

Unit Task 1: Decode the RFP (2% of course grade)

UNIT TASK 1

Decode the RFP

The purpose of this unit task is to get you thinking about how you will approach the progressive project for this course. You will examine the Request for Proposals and begin thinking about your focus for the project.

Note: Students in CMNS 3241 must complete this unit task for grades. Submission instructions can be found on the course Moodle site.

Part A: Decode the Request for Proposals (RFP)

The RFP is how clients normally solicit requests for proposals to conduct research or complete other projects. Thus, the assignment for the proposal is structured as an RFP to help you get familiar with this type of process.

  1. Look at Assignment 1: Project Proposal to access the RFP information. Read it carefully to pull the following kinds of information:

[Production: link to Assignment 1]

  1. Make a list of the specific pieces of information you must include in your proposal.

  2. Make a list of specific instructions for the creation/layout of the proposal document that you must remember to follow to ensure your document is complete and accurate.

  3. Based on the RFP, what is the overall purpose of the project? What should your proposal try to achieve?

Part B: Reflect and Focus

Having now read both the scenario overview and the request for proposals in the assignment, and having some idea of what a policy brief is, you may be beginning to generate some ideas of how you’d like to approach this work.

  1. Write about 200 words reflecting on what specific focus you might like to take for this project. You will have more time to refine your approach in Unit 1. These are just preliminary thoughts so you can get started. Here are some prompts to help you:

  2. Spend time thinking about the different areas of scope and focus suggested in the scenario overview and RFP in this unit. Which kinds of questions and areas of interest appeal to you? Economic? Social? Health and wellness? Culture? Other?

  3. What sectors of society are you interested in representing? Labour? Business? Families? Women? Young workers? Shift workers? Local cities? You can pick any interest group you like and explore this topic through their interests and priorities. You do not have to select a specific organization—just any defined group whose interests you’d like to represent and, finally, make recommendations for.

  4. Once you’ve thought about a specific sector of society, brainstorm some issues, problems, or questions that this group might have, related to the topic of flexible work environments. What are some opportunities, challenges, or needs that are faced from this perspective? For example, if you are interested in the health and wellness of shift workers, what kinds of questions or problems related to flexible work might you begin to explore?

Unit Task 1 will be graded on the following scale: 1% for attempt, 1.5% for evidence of inclusion of course material, or 2% for thoughtful engagement/interaction with the course material.

Please submit your Unit Task 1 and Unit Task 2 as one document at the end of Unit 1.

[Production: link, please]

References

Action Canada. (2020). Inclusive futures: Indigenous engagement in Canada’s workforce. Public Policy Forum. https://ppforum.ca/publications/inclusive-futures-indigenous-engagement-in-canadas-workforce

Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. (2021). Flexible work arrangements. https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/psychosocial/flexible.html Government of Canada. (2025).

Center for Poverty and Inequality Research. (n.d.). Policy briefs. https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/policy-briefs

Davis, S., Murphy, S. A., & Watkins, J. (2023). Work changes and employee perceptions of co-worker flexible work policy use: A moderated mediation study. Employee Relations, 45(2), 516–534. https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-02-2022-0064

Dilmaghani, M. (2021). There is a time and a place for work: Comparative evaluation of flexible work arrangements in Canada. International journal of Manpower, 42(1), 167–192. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJM-12-2019-0555

Flexible work arrangements for federally regulated employees. https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/corporate/portfolio/labour/programs/labour-standards/flexible-work-arrangements.html

Friedman, S. (2023, May 28). Employers need to prioritize employee mental health if they want to attract new talent. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/employers-need-to-prioritize-employee-mental-health-if-they-want-to-attract-new-talent-205738

Gianforti, A. (2020, February 25). How your organization can build trust in 2020. History Factory. https://www.historyfactory.com/insights/how-your-organization-can-build-trust-in-2020/

International Development Research Centre. (n.d.). How to write a policy brief. https://idrc-crdi.ca/en/funding/resources-idrc-grantees/how-write-policy-brief

Mullins, L. B., Charbonneau, É., & Riccucci, N. M. (2021). The effects of family responsibilities discrimination on public employees’ satisfaction and turnover intentions: Can flexible work arrangements help? Review of Public Personnel Administration, 41(2), 384–410. https://doi.org/10.1177/0734371X19894035

Orel, M., Dvouletý, O., & Ratten, V. (2021). The flexible workplace : Coworking and other modern workplace transformations. Springer.

Roberts-Crews, J. (2016). Writing for strategic communication industries. Ohio State University. https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/stratcommwriting/

Swancar, A. (2020). Woman in black jacket using macbook pro [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/woman-in-black-jacket-using-macbook-pro-NfPAO4IspSg

Thanthong-Knight, R. (2023, April 26). Civil servants’ push for remote work has Canadian employers watching anxiously. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-26/civil-servants-push-for-remote-work-has-canadian-employers-watching-anxiously

Weissman, D. G., Hatzenbuehler, M. L., Cikara, M., McLaughlin, K. A., & Barch, D. M. (2023). Social safety net mitigates the impact of poverty on brain development and mental health. Policy Brief, Center for Poverty & Inequality Research, 12(1). https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/post/social-safety-net-mitigates-impact-poverty-brain-development-and-mental-health