The background to our essay is the increasing focus on the conception of communication. Communication skills are becoming more important in today’s society considering the escalating flow of information. This is especially essential to organizations, because they need to communicate with their employees as well as the surrounding world. In order to accomplish good communication it is important to plan the activities and have useful strategies to carry through the communication work. The communication plan is an excellent tool to use in order to achieve successful communication in the organization. In theory most organizations are aware of the importance of good communication and trained public relation officers, therefore it is interesting to find out how organizations deal with this in practice. By studying communication plans from a number of organizations we wanted to find out how ambitious the communication planning is in these organizations. We wanted to know how much they focus on communication work in reality. The purpose of this essay is to find out if communication plans from real organizations are different from what the theories describe as a ‘perfect’ communication plan. In the theories we have found a number of component parts that should be included in a communication plan and with these, as a starting point, we have created ten analysis criteria. We have examined eleven plans from Government authorities, which are representing the ‘reality’ and we have then analyzed the plans on basis of our analysis criteria. After doing this we have compared the results with the ‘ideal’ plan from the theories to see how well theory and reality match. The issues that are interesting in this context are: Why is the communication plan a useful tool and how should it look like to perform the functions of an effective instrument? How does the communication plans appear at eleven Government authorities? Do they differ from the ideal plan, and if so, in what way? Our results show that reality is relative far from the ideal. Looking at the eleven plans the most professional ones are proportionately close to the ideal, but the great majorities do not fulfill the analysis criteria in a satisfying way. The results also show that there are a ranges of variation between how the Government authorities are handling their communication planning.