Weekly Comms Lead Briefing

What it is

A weekly briefing is a short, structured summary a comms lead produces for themselves, or has produced for them, at the start of each week. It gathers what happened last week, what is scheduled this week, what is waiting on a decision, and what the quarterly priorities say should matter, and turns them into a page: progress, blockers, upcoming, and a short prioritised list. The point is to begin the week from a synthesis rather than from whichever email arrived last.

The routine is the template; AI does the assembly. Once your notes, calendar and tracker are in a form you can paste or connect, the briefing takes ten minutes and gets better each week because the previous briefing is one of the inputs. Over a quarter you also have a dated record of what the function did, which the quarterly review otherwise has to reconstruct.

When to use it

Use this template when:

• You lead a small comms team, or are the comms team, and the week starts in the inbox
• Decisions are waiting on you and you find out on Thursday
• A Monday team meeting has become a status round that could be a page
• You want a record of the quarter as it happens, not reconstructed at the end
• You are trying a first automated routine and want one that pays back immediately

Don’t use this template if:

• Your organisation already runs a weekly operating rhythm that produces this
• You need a monitoring brief on the outside world; that is the Weekly Monitoring Brief, and it can feed this one
• The week is too unstructured to plan (a live crisis); use the crisis playbook and come back after

Inputs needed

Before starting, gather:

• Last week’s notes: meeting summaries, a task list with completions, sent emails, the previous briefing
• This week’s calendar, including deadlines and anything external
• The team tracker, project list or content calendar, in any exportable form
• The quarter’s priorities, written down, so the briefing can score the week against them
• A note of anything you already know is stuck

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The template

Briefing header

Week of: [Date] Prepared: [Date and time] Priorities this quarter: [Three to five, one line each]

1. What moved last week

Item	Progress	Against priority	Note
[Project or task]	[Done / Advanced / Slipped]	[Which priority, or none]	[One line]

2. Where I am the blocker

Waiting on me	Since	Who is waiting	What they need	Do by
[Decision, approval, reply, input]	[Date]	[Name]	[The specific thing]	[Day]

3. Coming this week

Day	What	Prep needed	Owner
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri

4. Outside signals worth knowing

[Two to four lines: sector, competitor, media or policy items that bear on this week’s work. Pull from the Weekly Monitoring Brief if you run one.]

5. This week’s priorities

Sort candidate tasks by whether they are important (move a quarterly priority or protect the organisation) and urgent (dated this week):

	Urgent	Not urgent
Important	Do first: [items]	Schedule: [items]
Not important	Delegate or shrink: [items]	Drop or park: [items]

The four or five things that get the week: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. Carried over

[Anything from last week’s list that did not happen and why. If it has been carried three weeks, decide whether it is a priority or not.]

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AI prompt

Base prompt

Act as my chief of staff and produce my weekly briefing for the week of [DATE]. I lead communications at [ORGANISATION]. My priorities this quarter are:
[LIST THREE TO FIVE]

Inputs:
Last week's notes and completed tasks: [PASTE]
Last week's briefing: [PASTE, OR "none, this is the first"]
This week's calendar: [PASTE]
Team tracker or project list: [PASTE]
Anything I already know is stuck: [PASTE]

Produce a one-page briefing with six sections:
1. What moved last week: a table of items with Done, Advanced or Slipped, which quarterly priority each serves (or none), and a one-line note.
2. Where I am the blocker: everything in the inputs that is waiting on my decision, approval, reply or input, with how long it has waited, who is waiting and what exactly they need. Be blunt; this is the most useful section.
3. Coming this week: by day, with the preparation each item needs.
4. Outside signals worth knowing: only if the inputs contain any; otherwise write "none in inputs".
5. This week's priorities: sort candidate tasks into a two-by-two of important against urgent, where important means it moves a quarterly priority or protects the organisation and urgent means it is dated this week. Then name the four or five things that should get the week, with one line each on why.
6. Carried over: items from last week's briefing that did not happen, with the number of weeks carried.

Rules: use only what is in the inputs; do not invent tasks, dates or people. Where something is ambiguous, list it under a short "Check" heading at the end rather than guessing. Keep the whole thing to one page. Plain language, no motivational tone.

Prompt variations

Variation 1 – Team version:

Same inputs, but produce the briefing for my team of [N] rather than for me: replace "where I am the blocker" with "decisions needed and from whom", add a line per person on their main item this week, and end with three questions we should settle in a fifteen-minute Monday call rather than an hour.

Variation 2 – Feeding the quarterly review:

Here are my last [N] weekly briefings: [PASTE]. Summarise the quarter so far against the priorities: what each priority has moved, where effort went that served no priority, items carried more than three weeks, and the blockers that recurred. Two pages, tables where they help. This feeds the quarterly review.

Variation 3 – Bad week ahead:

This week is overloaded. Here is everything: [PASTE]. Using the important-against-urgent sort, tell me what to drop, what to delegate and to whom (from the tracker), what to move to next week, and the three things that must survive. For each drop, draft the one-line message to the person affected.

Variation 4 – Setting it up as a routine:

I want this briefing produced every Monday at 08:00 without my pasting anything. My notes live in [TOOL], my calendar in [TOOL], my tracker in [TOOL]. Tell me what a scheduled task or automation would need access to, what it should read, what it should never send anywhere, and the one thing I should check by hand each week before trusting it.

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Human review checklist

• Is every item in “what moved” a real completion or a real slip, not a restatement of the plan?
• Does “where I am the blocker” name the people waiting and what they need, specifically?
• Does each of the week’s four or five priorities trace to a quarterly priority or to protecting the organisation?
• Has anything been carried three weeks or more, and has a decision been made about it?
• Have the “Check” items been resolved or knowingly left?
• Is the briefing one page? If not, what should have been cut?
• Did it take under fifteen minutes to produce and read? If not, which input is too messy?
• Has nothing confidential gone into a tool it should not, per your AI Use Policy?

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Tips for success

Make the blocker section honest. Its only purpose is to show you what is waiting on you. If it is empty two weeks running, the inputs are missing something.

Feed it last week’s briefing. The carried-over section only works if the previous briefing is an input. Save each one in the same place.

Cap the priorities at five. A list of twelve is the inbox in a new format.

Let the inputs be messy. Raw meeting notes and an exported task list are enough. Cleaning them first is the step that kills the routine.

Automate the assembly, not the judgement. Once the inputs live somewhere a tool can read, schedule the assembly. Keep the fifteen-minute read and the priority calls for yourself.

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Common pitfalls

Producing it and not reading it. The briefing is a prompt for decisions, not a record for its own sake. If Monday’s blockers are still there on Friday, the routine is decorative.

Treating every task as important. Important means it moves a quarterly priority or protects the organisation. Most tasks are neither, and the sort is only useful if you let them fall into the other boxes.

Skipping the outside signals. A week planned without reference to what is happening in the sector is a week that gets rewritten on Tuesday.

Letting carried-over items ride. Three weeks is the limit. At that point it is either scheduled or parked, and the briefing should say which.

Pasting confidential material into a consumer tool. Meeting notes contain names, figures and unannounced decisions. Use the tool your AI Use Policy allows for internal material, and strip what should not travel.

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