How to conduct an internal communications audit

Planning season is here. But before you write a single objective for 2027, find out what's happening today.

Picture this: It’s autumn and internal communicators across the country are opening a blank document titled ‘Comms plan 2027,’ and staring at it. There’s nothing more daunting than that empty white glare, right?

We understand the temptation to start with the plan. Plans are great! Satisfying, with see-the-future timelines and colour-coded internal comms calendars and a wonderful sense of movement. But a plan built on assumptions is a guess in a Gantt chart.

According to Gallagher’s 2026 Employee Communications Report, only 18% of communicators act strategically, though 73% say they want to.¹

What separates the two groups is usually evidence –strategic teams find it easier to show what’s working. 

So, get a head start on planning season and carry out an audit first. Here’s how to do one properly.

What's an internal communications audit?  

An audit is an honest look at how communication works in your organisation right now. 

It means taking a magnifying glass to three things:

1. Your channels. What exists, who uses it and would anyone notice if it disappeared? Most organisations are running at least one channel out of habit rather than need.

2. Your content. What you're saying, how often and in whose voice. Look at a month’s output in one sitting and patterns will begin to emerge.

3. Your audience. What colleagues think, hear and feel. This is the part most audits skip, but it's the part that matters the most.

Start with the numbers, but don't stop there 

Data goes with an audit like cheddar goes with Branston Pickle. (Insert your own match made in heaven if you’re averse to a ploughman's.) Open rates, intranet analytics, app adoption, survey scores. Gather what you have and look for the gaps between what you send and what gets read.

But remember, numbers only tell you what happened. They can't tell you why. A newsletter with a 60% open rate might be genuinely valued, or it might be opened, skimmed and forgotten in seconds. You won't know until you ask.

Then listen. Properly

This is where communication audits earn their keep. Focus groups, confidential interviews, pulse surveys, or simply sitting with a night shift and asking what they know about the company's priorities. Prepare to be humbled.

The confidential part matters. People often tell an outside researcher things they would never put in an employer-branded survey. We've spent decades running confidential interviews and colleague research, and the gap between what organisations think their people believe and what their people actually believe is where the interesting stuff lives.

If you're doing this in-house, protect anonymity fiercely and ask open questions. “What do you wish you knew more about?” beats “Do you find the intranet useful?” every time.

We wrote about why listening is the foundation of everything in our 60-second guide to IC storytelling. The short version is that listening turns communication into conversation. Audits are listening at scale.

Look for the gaps, not just the scores 

The most useful audit findings are usually gaps. 

The gap between what leaders think they've communicated and what colleagues have heard. The gap between your most-used channel and your most-trusted one (not always the same thing). And the gap between office-based colleagues and everyone else. (The IC Index 2026² found that employees who aren't regularly connected to a computer are less likely to feel safe speaking up.)

If part of your workforce is on the road, on the shop floor, in a ward or warehouse, your audit needs to work harder to reach them, because they're the colleagues least likely to volunteer the truth.

When we worked with Royal Mail on Robin, their employee app, the starting point wasn't a channel decision. It was understanding how 130,000 people, most of them nowhere near a desk, actually wanted to hear from their organisation. The answer shaped everything that followed.

Turn findings into decisions 

An audit that just ends in a report is a wasted audit. It should end in recommendations or, better, decisions.

Be ruthless. What are you stopping? What are you fixing? What are you starting? Every finding should map to one of those three. This is where your comms planning becomes considerably easier, because you're no longer choosing between infinite options. You're responding to evidence. You're being strategic.

Those decisions become the backbone of next year's plan. If you're wondering what that looks like on paper, we'd suggest a simple structure:

• Objectives drawn from your findings

• Audiences defined by how they receive information

• Channels that earned their place

• A realistic comms calendar

When to bring in outside help 

You can absolutely audit your own work. Plenty of good IC teams do. 

But there are two limits. The first is time. A proper audit is weeks of work, usually landing exactly when you're busiest. 

The second is harder to fix. Colleagues won't always tell you the truth. Not because they're dishonest, but because you're the messenger being assessed. An outside perspective hears things an internal one can't.

That's been our starting point with clients for more than sixty years, and it's where the most valuable work tends to begin. Not with a campaign but with a question like, “What's really going on in here?”

If planning season is looming and you'd like an honest answer to that question, we should talk. Just email info@abcomm.co.uk.