How do you manage to communicate about your project with virtually no marketing budget? This was a question someone asked me after my presentation on how to market your project at a PMI PMXPO event.
We don’t all have big budgets to produce banners, T-shirts and mugs with logos on to share the messages about our projects. You do? Oh, good for you. Go and read this about the collaboration software you can use on your projects.
If you are still here, then you don’t have a big budget for project communications. You are in the majority. So let’s look at what options you have for cheap or free project marketing.
Everyday low-cost communication channels
There are lots of things you can do for free or for very little money (if you don’t count the time spent). Here are some ideas to build in your communication plan for stakeholder engagement.
1. Email newsletters
Many companies will have internal email newsletters that you could request content in. Find out who runs your company’s briefings and contact them for the publication schedule.
You can create your own project email newsletters and send those out on a schedule that suits you. Write about a mix of the project management effort (like big project workshops or governance milestones) and more about the people working on the project, benefits and the end result you are expecting.
Watch out for information overload! Don’t send too often.
2. Intranet sites
Intranet sites are ‘pull’ communication in that people won’t necessarily go there for information, but they are still a channel worth exploring.
Case studies, day-in-the-life and project milestone or success led pieces work well as communications out to the broader organisation. Infographics and statistics pieces are also good. And your AI tool can make them for you — I’ve done some nice ones in Claude to make PowerPoint slides.
Link to Google Forms or a Sharepoint form to get some feedback, and enable the comments feature if you have one — your intranet presence could become a content collaboration hub if you have the time and skills to keep it updated.
3. Leaflets and posters
Print materials can be cheap communication methods, especially if you have access to a printer in the office and aren’t looking for amazing quality. Leaflets and posters work well for locations where many of the people you are trying to reach aren’t on the computer all the time. For example, in healthcare, hotels, cafes and restaurants, building sites etc.
Just remember to take them down or switch them out at the right point in the project lifecycle!
4. Meeting people one-on-one and buying them coffee
Got something worth sharing in person? If you have the time and the energy, simply catching up with colleagues on a one-to-one basis works really well. Also a great way to practice your active listening skills and get real-time feedback!
If there are other in-person meetings you could gatecrash to talk about your project, such as other teams’ regular meetings, then why not get on the agenda?
5. Town Hall style meetings
Large scale huddles, team meetings for directorates, divisions or departments are all opportunities for you or your project sponsor to take the microphone and explain more about your project. Whether they are video conferencing or in-person, you’ll get in front of a larger audience.
I have spoken on a stage in a packed hall about one of my projects, and also done virtual presentations as part of huddles. This can be interactive communication — if you are prepared to take questions, make sure you leave enough time in your slot to do so and seed some questions in the audience in case no one else puts their hand up!
Schedule department events
Get the dates of department events and put them in your project communication plan. Personally, I add the deadline for materials to my Outlook calendar so I’m ahead for submitting slides and so on.
6. Quizzes with a small token prize
Quizzes are surprisingly popular and only need a small token prize. I have used these where all the questions were related to the project in some way. You can use Copilot or your AI tool of choice to get some great questions!
I also set up a virtual treasure hunt, where people had to search our project microsite for a particular logo, and when they found it, note the number they found and the locations for a prize. We themed this around a special national event that was happening at the time, so it was “newsworthy” in an internal way.
7. Using the project team as “marketing outreach” people to spread the message
Project comms isn’t just the role of the project manager or sponsor. Talk to your team about how they talk about the project outside of the immediate project stakeholders.
Make sure they have the skills and resources available to them so they can also be champions for the work they are doing. Then you can share the communication responsibilities around through the team!
Get a free project communications template in the members-only template library.
8. Project management software and documentation
Set up your project management software with dashboards or tailored views for different stakeholders, so people can interrogate the data in real-time. This won’t share the narrative of your project, unless you also have something like a comments feed you can commit to keeping up to date, but it is another way people can get progress updates.
Software, in my experience, is very much a ‘pull’ channel, where people choose to access it and self-serve, but you could also set up push notification features like sending out a weekly report. AI can automate the creation of dashboards and sending out regular updates if you configure it to do so.
Project documentation can also count as a asynchronous communication. Your stakeholder analysis would have shown who gets what documentation on what cadence. In my experience, this is a terrible way of “communicating” and is the absolute bare minimum level. Stakeholder satisfaction is not improved by sharing a risk management log or meeting notes.
Software is pretty poor at being a feedback loop though, so if you are expecting commentary back as part of your communication management plan, you’ll have to look for it another way.
Get crafty
Got any skills? Or know people who do? If you’re prepared to put the effort in, you can create moments for the team with skills you already have. One of your communication goals is probably to ensure high motivation in the project team, so finding ways to be grateful and say thanks is important.
9. Hand-made thank yous
Use the skills you have. I once roped in my entire family to make 160 ‘thank you’ labels to go on bottles of wine (which the project had paid for). We sat on the floor in the living room, cutting out labels, punching holes, decorating them, cutting and tying ribbon to hold them on.
Then one of my colleagues hand-wrote ‘thank you’ on all of them and put them on the bottles one evening. When we came to give them out, we invited each recipient to select either red or white from the wine in boxes. They all took off the label and left it in the box.
No acknowledgement of our hard work or the personal touch we had tried to hard to show. Lesson learned: For that group of stakeholders, just give them the alcohol! (We did have some alternatives for non-alcohol drinkers, because we’re that kind of thoughtful project team who are aware of cultural differences and individual preferences.)
Lesson learned!
Cheap i.e. craftily making all the thank you labels ourselves didn’t have the impact I thought it would but on the other hand if I’d spent a lot of money getting labels printed it would have felt much more wasted.
Could you use a crafty session as a team building exercise?
10. Competition prizes
I have crocheted a desk ornament as a prize for a project competition. I’m not sure that the recipient was particularly grateful (he would have probably preferred a bottle of wine) but it showed personality and was fun for me to do.
Competitions aren’t necessarily something you’d put on the communication schedule, but if you have another event going on at the same time, you can add a competition to it for some extra engagement.
Food as a communication tool
So many of my top project moments seem to revolve around food — whether it’s drinks in the pub with snacks to celebrate a milestone, a cake-cutting ceremony to mark the end of a project or launch events, food is a great way to build interest in your project with a communication-theme.
11. Personalized cake toppers
Another cheap thing to do is to get rice paper logos printed and then use them as cake toppers. I did this for the pilot launch of a new piece of software. I was able to offer cakes to the first users with pictures of the office building on the top, and some with the company logo. In hindsight, photos of people would have been more interesting.
Tip!
Don’t put the rice paper toppers on the cakes the day before. The ink leached into the icing and the pictures weren’t that clear. For best results, stick them on just before you bring them out.
12. Table decorations
Even if you’re on a tight leash with your expenses, items such as custom table cloths as a backdrop for your cupcakes and food will help raise the profile of your project.
Table decorations are an affordable way to make your table setup look impressive, as stakeholders pass by in the reception area or at a launch event. You can make them yourself, or if you have a friend with a Cricut machine, a 3D printer or laser cutter, then you’ll be able to make something in the shape of a project logo, in brand colors.
Cakes, crochet, wine… these ideas reflect my personality and the leadership style I bring to my projects. You might be different. Tap into your interests and those of the team.
Use video
Video production is a lot cheaper these days, and people are much more forgiving of dubious quality. You don’t have to have any special skills and comms with visual aids, whether that’s video, infographics or photos, always seems to land better in my opinion than text only.
13. Low cost video content
Give it a go on your tablet or phone and record your project sponsor explaining the vision. It can be a really powerful (and cost-effective) way of sharing the key messages about your project without them being diluted by operational managers re-telling the story to their staff.
Upload your video to Viva Engage, your intranet or whatever Slack or Teams channel will help you reach the most people.
Some video tips:
- Shoot in natural light. If you don’t have studio lights, natural is better. Think big windows or outside.
- Don’t shoot into the light. Don’t position your interviewee directly in front of the window.
- Audio quality matters. If they can’t hear what the person on screen is saying then this undermines your whole effort to communicate effectively. Minimise background noise.
- Add subtitles. Most people will watch the video in the background to other work and may not be able to put the sound on.
- Do a screen test. Take a short video, then play it back. Show the person what they look like on screen (many people are worried about this). Check the background and audio quality. Move any distracting background items and make sure that it doesn’t look like a pot plant is growing out of their head or anything.
Read next: My project case study on using video for comms.
I used to use a separate video camera for recording, but now my iPhone and a tripod give even better results. An external microphone helps but I have also used no microphone in a quite room.
I mainly use Wondershare Filmora to edit my video and add text overlays to show who is speaking but I’ve done a few using the YouTube video editor and that is pretty good too.
Get a bigger budget (when you can)
The best way to manage your project budget for communications is to get a bigger budget. You might not know what you want to do at the start of your project but you can guarantee you’ll be doing something!
14. Build in contingency
Put some money aside when you create your project budget for communications. Even a small amount can be useful to handle the unexpected costs of having to hire a meeting room to give a presentation to key stakeholders or something like that.
15. Make the case for investment
Talk to your project sponsor when the project begins and explain why it’s so important to share positive messages about your project. A reminder: project management communication is important because:
- You need people to engage on the project – and engage properly, not just nodding.
- To do that they have to understand what you are doing.
- Then they need to want to be part of it.
- Get some materials made, like a pull-up banner. Great if you are taking your comms ‘on the road’ or sending materials to different offices.
- Because that reduces resistance to change and increases the chance of successful adoption and therefore getting the benefits in the business case.
Your project sponsor will want success – if they don’t, you shouldn’t be doing the project at all. Good communications is part of the drive for success, and if your sponsor doesn’t get that then they aren’t a very good sponsor.
If you can’t get any money put aside for project marketing activity then hopefully the ideas here will at least give you some free and low-cost suggestions for creating engaging communications on your projects.
This article first appeared on Rebel’s Guide to Project Management and can be read here: 15 Cheap and free project communication ideas that actually work
