Signpost Communications

A mentor of mine used to say,

“Send up a flair and people will pay attention. Send up 100 and they’ll sit back and watch the fireworks.”

Those of us in communications know the struggle all too well. Our clients think there is no cost to communicating, so why wouldn’t we do it? (See "The cost of communicating" box below.) And, since they’re paid to focus on their small section of the world, they understandably have no perspective, no sense for how important this issue is in the big picture. Nothing matters more to them, so what’s our problem?

When these two things collide, we get inboxes filled with messages that are irrelevant, unimportant, or might have some impact … someday … maybe. Good luck remembering what that was by the time you actually need it.

Reality check

Here’s what we know:

• People don’t read if they can help it—especially not paragraphs.
• Employees won’t be interested in any message that isn’t relevant to them right now.
• Across all industries, around 68% of emails are opened (raise your hand if you think that's high) and most of those who open it won’t read the whole message.[1] Think posting information on an intranet site is going to be more effective than something sent directly to employees?

Of libraries and signposts

So far, this discussion has, by implication, been about proactive communications: Your employees need to know this now because something will happen later. But that’s just not how most people operate. It’s far better to communicate in one of two ways:

• Referentially – Create a single (1, one, uno, un) place where people can search for and reliably get the answers they need at the moment they need them. If you’ve buried answers in so many places that people need a treasure map to find them, they won’t bother.
• Contextually – This is something app designers are pretty good at. When you go to do something, a message may pop up and give you some important information right there on the page, at the moment you need it. Sure, maybe they sent you an email about that thing a couple of weeks or months ago, but they know how humans actually work. And we should too.

I call these “signpost communications” because they’re brief, relevant bits of information found along the path of the task you’re wanting to complete. That email you sent about this last week? There was zero application for it, no hooks to hang it on, no reason to pay attention to it or remember it.

But here, now, while you’re trying to do that thing is where people need it and will be the most likely to pay attention to it. It’s a signpost right in front of them, between them and the thing they’re trying to accomplish.

Questions that clarify

As hopeless as this may sound, we have the power to change things. Rather than being order-takers, we can ask some questions of anyone wanting to communicate:

• Why does this need to be communicated?

- What’s the impact? (Number of people/transactions/interactions impacted)

- What will happen if this isn’t communicated?

- What action is required?

• Who is this relevant to?

- If a subset of the whole, is there a way we can communicate just to those impacted?

• Is there a way to communicate this at the moment it will be needed—e.g., in an app, form, or webpage when a relevant action is being performed?
• Is there a reason this can’t be communicated passively by putting it in a searchable resource?

The answers to these questions will do two really important things:

1. Facilitate a discussion that will help your partner/client understand your thought processes and concerns.
2. Determine if something needs to be communicated and how.

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What’s not to love?

[1] “How to Improve Internal Email Open Rates and Click-Through Rates”