Boosting your organisation with targeted communications

It's well known that small investments in strategic communications can lead to big and impressive results for companies and organisations. So why do some organisations not make the most of its potential?

Think for a moment of some of the major events of recent times. Think, for example, of Britain’s vote for Brexit, an unexpected vote and a very unexpected result that precipitated a divisive period in the country's history with unprecedented political upheaval. Think, perhaps, of Donald Trump’s accession to the US presidency and his equally divisive style of leadership, which continues in his current campaign. Think, for example, of this year's elections in France, where a shift to the left shook up the status quo and France's politics has taken time to settle.

Politics, eh? But is it only that?

A key element running through all these events is that they succeeded because of successful and targeted communications. By getting the voters to grasp their key message, agree with it, and then act accordingly (by voting in the right way, or donating), the campaigns changed the behaviour of sufficient number of voters to change the overall results of the vote – from Bremain to Brexit, from Clinton to Trump - and thereby sent the UK, the USA and the World down new evolutionary pathways that will continue for decades. And this national and international change was effected by just a handful of people who could see clearly the results they wanted and knew how to use communications to achieve them.

Communications drives behavioural change

Communications is about influencing and changing the behaviour of your target subjects, and we all do it all of the time – at work, we communicate so we can collaborate on a new project; at play, on a cliff by the seaside, we communicate to warn someone not to get too close to the edge; at home, we communicate to try to convince our children to eat their greens.

Yet it is surprising how many ‘higher ups’, in my experience, fail to understand the value of professional communications for their own organisations. In one role I was assured at the highest level that communications is only a service – and the 'powers that be' (my quote marks) were wondering if they should even bother to keep a unit and staff dedicated to communications, and instead parse it out to consultants when they (they, the non-communicators) felt it was needed.

Yet in other organisations I’ve worked in, communications is recognised as integral to the functioning and development of the organisation at all levels, with specific and defined roles in play to help achieve the organisation’s goals and strategy, and to drive efficiency, improvements, expansion and impact. In these cases, it is usually an integral part of the organisation’s overall strategy, and its role and the commitments needed to ensure its success have been discussed openly and agreed by all. These commitments include the human and financial commitments – small investments in strategic communications can lead to big and impressive results for companies and organisations.

The strategic involvement of communications is important to well-run organisations that look to the future and keep on top of changes in the market as well as innovating new products by themselves to drive new opportunities. Without this, and the driving force and impact that communications can bring, such organisations may remain stuck in the past, always playing catchup with others with clearer ideas of what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve them.

OK, now prove it works!

Whilst it’s easy to blame the bosses for their lack of comms savvy-ness, they’ve probably got their minds on other things, and it is incumbent on communications professionals to provide the evidence to back up our claims of importance and essentiality ( as it is incumbent on bosses to keep open and supportive minds).

There are plenty of well-known examples (e.g. those mentioned earlier, and gazillions more) of how communications drives change and influences behaviour (the proof that it works), but often in organisations it’s not easy to show its benefits because the behaviour change we want is more complicated to measure – firstly we want someone to follow our social media account, then we’d like them to engage with a particular post, and then we’d like them to decide to donate ten dollars to us, or a hundred, and then to decide to make it an annual donation, and finally to leave us a legacy. The pathway to impact of our communications action is not easy to trace, especially as it happens remotely (in someone's mind), and perhaps in someone’s home to which we have no access.

Demonstrating how communications helps

Communications units, in my experience, rarely even try to demonstrate how their work benefits the organisation. Think of an Annual Report. The comms section, if there is one, will include selected analytics on the number of followers on social media and the most popular pages on the website, but often no deeper evaluation, nor how these figures have translated into results, with or without being able to show clearly cause and effect. ?

Now I confess that I’m not a fan of analytics, not because they are numbers rather than words, but because they are often treated as the most important means of measuring communications success, whereas in fact they are just one. (We doubled our followers! Great! So…how did that help us achieve our goals? Ohhhh yes, oops, sorry, no idea.) ?Analytics are sometimes given great prominence to drive website and social media design and activity, yet without direction and purpose and a means of measuring ‘downstream’ behavioural change, they’ll never truly enable us to understand and tap into the potential that, for example, a large increase in followers represents. They are a useful tool to help us down the road, but we need better and more meaningful ways of measuring our results.

Active efforts to develop communications results and impact monitoring and measurement will provide demonstrable evidence for the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of communication’s contribution to an organisation’s development, which can be coupled with an internal marketing campaign to change bosses’ attitudes to communications and their resulting behaviour towards investing in and engaging with it. Needs must, and everyone has a different understanding of communications, but its an opportunity to galvanise support and collectivise involvement.

Measuring the results - next steps

I’ll be investigating further and reporting on what I find on the latest communications impact measuring systems here on Linkedin over the next months. Do join me on my learning journey, and do share your thoughts and experiences below if you like.

And if you'd like to understand how small investments in communications can help create big results in your company or organisation, or if you need advice on how to improve what you're doing already, do get in touch.

Thanks very much for reading.

Andrew

#MK6101 #communications #

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(The caption for the header photo is not saving at the moment - it is of course of Greta Thunberg, on a 'Friday for Future' march in Bristol, UK, in February 2020. Thunberg's success relied in part on well-managed strategic communications from her side, but also tapped the devolved communications networks of social media. Photo by me.)