“How do I make sure that people read my newsletter?”
“How do I make people look at my website?”
“How do I make sure that people listen to me?”
These are questions which I regularly hear from my clients. And I usually have to answer with another question – how sure are you that you need a newsletter or a website?
You can’t make anyone read anything or listen to you, but you can align it so closely with what they need that they want to take a look.
The world is changing
It’s very easy to think that if you could just make your newsletter or Instagram feed more interesting and make it more accessible, then suddenly your audience would be hanging on your every word. If you could just put more pictures in it, they would do everything that you would like them to do.
But even if a magazine was exactly what you needed 7 years ago and everyone read it from cover to cover, that might not still be true today. As your organisation and the people in it have changed, so have their communication needs and preferences. In the same way that your business goals and plans need to be regularly updated, so your communication strategies and plans need updating too.
There is no single ‘right’ communication method, just more or less effective ones for different organisations and given scenarios.
- An online forum will be great for gathering views from your back office people who have constant web access (providing you have a culture that allows them to use it).
- But when will your shop floor employees have opportunity to access it? If they have regular team meetings or ‘stand ups’ before the shop opens, asking for their opinion then is likely to be far more effective (assuming you have a culture where they are happy to speak up).
Context matters for communication
When you are selecting the best comms methods for your project or organisation, you need to be really honest with yourself about the ‘providing….’ and ‘assuming….’ parts of those sentences. Your specific culture will have a significant impact. If people don’t feel comfortable speaking up about their experience or opinions, the communication channel you use is not the problem.
Effectiveness of communication is always influenced by context, so think about:
- what you’re trying to achieve
- what situation your intended audience are realistically working with.
- what do they want to hear about (not just what you want to tell them)
- what are life and communication at your organisation really like
It is possible to have a rough guideline of which channels will be best for a given outcome. For example, an online forum is good for collaborating, newsletters are good for providing updates, community meetings are good for discussing local impact. But I urge you to use them as guidelines only and not the whole story. Take what you know and add it to the advice and guidance of others to create the most effective way to communicate for your organisation.
If you need help finding out what your audiences’ preferences are and how to connect with them, please get in touch with me to discuss how I could support you.
Until next time
Sarah