Involve communications as early as possible.
What is communication
The role of communication is to advance the strategic goals of the organization using offerings.
It does this in two ways:
- Reputation management with stakeholders
- Attracting, serving, and retaining stakeholders.
What does this look like?
Take policy-makers. To inform their decisions – a strategic goal –, you need to:
- Be a credible source of information (reputation management)
- Create something valuable in their eyes, for example, research on a topic they care about (attracting)
- Provide it to them appropriately, for example, in a memo (serving)
- Create trust and continue to provide value so you continue to inform their decisions, for example, answer their questions and create a follow-up memo (retaining)
Why organizations fail at communication
They don't realize that the decision about what to work on is a comms decision. If you chose to write a 50-page report, you already lost, not because reports are bad, but because you made the format decision before the audience decision.
You might be making important comms decisions while completely skipping over the wisdom and the tools that all healthy organizations rely on to make these decisions.
To start a new initiative or a new report without looking through the communication lens is a mistake. Without meaning it, you have massively cut down the impact communication can have for this project.
To use this communication lens, start by asking three questions:
- Which specific stakeholder, with which specific powers, need to think, feel, or do something different for our strategic goal to advance?
- What do they currently believe, and what needs to change?
- What is the most valuable thing we can offer them?
Failing to answer those questions leads to massive mistakes, lost opportunity, and in efficient markets, death of the organization.
The answers are not simple. They require research, uncomfortable trade-offs, and honesty.
Organizations that skip this don’t save time. They spend it differently: on outputs nobody reads, events nobody remembers, and relationships that never deepen. They confuse activity with impact. They produce more and achieve less.
Take the last question where failure is most damaging: what is the most valuable thing we can offer them? Most organizations start from what they want to say rather than what their stakeholders want to receive, so they fail.
To answer them well, you need to make uncomfortable trade-offs:
- You need to admit that your 40-page report is not what the policy-maker needs
- You need to recognize that the channel you prefer is not the channel your stakeholder uses.
Legible, satisfying work, like making a polished demo or launching a website are orthogonal to impact. Actual comms work is unglamorous: research, guesses, statistics, experiments.