You are asked to complete a communications audit, adapted to demonstrated application of concepts from this course, of a company of your choosing using the company website as well as either or both 1) their in-store presence or 2) their physical representation in brochures or magazine ads. There must be a physical communication aspect to the company that you choose beyond their online presence that you are able to examine.

Due to the timeframe of the course, it would be impossible to obtain IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval to conduct surveys for this class project, so please be aware that you may not conduct any surveys or interviews for your chosen company. This includes all surveys, including but not limited to surveys of any employees and/or managers and/or owners and/or customers of your chosen company. If you have access to existing surveys conducted by the company, you may use those. If you are choosing a company that you work for, you can include and cite any conversations that you have in the course of business, but you may not ask anything specific to be used in the report.

Typically, a communication audit is undertaken in order to discover the strengths and weaknesses of communication between a variety of constituents related to a company. Those constituents include management, employees, customers and other groups such as investors, the news media, and regulators and legislative bodies. The objective of the audit is to improve future communications by making recommendations to improve any weaknesses in the organizations communications. Examples of the focus of such recommendations may be to achieve brand recognition, modify perceptions, maximize sales, encourage community support or establish leadership, all depending upon the areas in which communication challenges are uncovered through your audit. If you believe that you have chosen a company for which you can not find any areas of improvement, you will need to change your choice of company. Each Communication Audit must include recommendations for improvement.

Milestone 1:

A) Choose your company. In selecting an organization it can be an organization or company that the student is associated with, or it can be an organization based on the interest of the student. A company that you can visit will be easier than one that you only have access to via the web and printed materials. Write a preliminary description of the process you will utilize to gather, organize, and report information. Include a well-written backstory, in the third person, as to why you were hired as the consultant to perform the audit. This will demonstrate more creative writing than the remainder of the audit. Specify at least three (3) sources of data collection related to organizational communication and how you will access that information.

Your submission will include:

Student's Name:

Organization Selected:

Communication Audit Topic (what areas of communication will you focus on?):

Student Affiliation with the organization (if any are you an Employee? Customer? Owner?):

Sources of Data for information about the company (at least 3):

Method of accessing data (in person, existing documents, online, etc.):

Backstory: