Summer is here! While many of us are too old to enjoy the break that comes along with the hottest season of the year, many of our clients (especially those in education) slow up during this season. While this may sound like a lighter workload and a dream for many, the client is still paying us to work for them throughout the whole year. But what is there to do, you may ask. Plenty: Here are some great tips to stay productive during the season of sun.

• Make an In-Person Visit

• • What’s better than a field trip? If there isn’t a lot going on with the client, schedule a visit to its offices or campuses. Everyone has grown accustomed to weekly and monthly check-ins over Zoom, so think about switching it up and spending the day with people face to face. 

Visiting a client at its place of business can allow you to get a feel for how they work and to meet with people you normally wouldn’t be able to see on a regular call. Meeting new people can unlock new ideas for future stories. You can take time to set up one of Momentum’s famous PR Academy sessions in which we meet with potential spokespeople and they share their stories. 

Most importantly, scheduling an in-person visit lets the client know that we have not forgotten about them. This face time is invaluable. 

• Develop a Comms Plan Envisioning Your Work For the Rest of the Year

• • Does your client have a particular message they want to focus on for the rest of the year? Do they have goals they want to achieve? If so, the summer is the time to map out how your team can help the client achieve those goals with your help and guidance.

A communications plan is a great tool to help your team and the client find a central theme that they want and to figure out how to achieve it. This plan consists of a central theme, coming events, communications goals and tactics to hit these marks and potential media targets.

Use this down time to plan the rest of the year. Put your goals and strategy on paper and go out and execute it!

• Prepare For the Fall

• • Fall is when the work of most nonprofit organizations tends to pick up, with the start of school, fall galas and days such as Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday being of great importance. Use the summer to talk to the client and get a sense of what upcoming events are important to the client and what they need from your team to support them, whether it’s securing coverage of Thanksgiving food drives, getting a big profile of the organization’s CEO, writing remarks for a gala or putting together a coverage report to help drive donations for Giving Tuesday. You should end the summer and go into the fall with a clear sense of what needs to be done next season. 

Don’t let the summer end without having a plan of attack. Failure to prepare is preparation to fail.

• Secure Some Summer Placements

• • Just because the work has slowed down, doesn’t mean the media hits have to. Broadcast, print and online outlets have to publish stories every day, so there will always be a need for stories about organizations doing good work in their communities. Look to place any story about the client you can, no matter how big or small, just to keep its name out there. You never know who will see it and it can lead to a bigger opportunity down the road. 

The best communications professionals are always doing something to help the client no matter the weather. Make use of this slow period and save yourself some effort later.