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by Steve Elliott
A few years ago, at a meeting of the four Regional IPM
Centers, a web designer was briefing the group on a new website he was
building. The first question someone asked was what colors he planned to use.
I cringed. We hadn’t talked about the purpose of the site
and who it would reach and what content we’d post but here we were picking
colors.
Unfortunately, at programs and laboratories and companies
and districts everywhere, a lot of communication comes about this way. Someone
decides they need to be on Twitter or update a brochure or do a podcast (or use
blue on a website) without asking the basic questions first. Who is our audience? What do they need? How can we best reach them?
Good communication doesn’t start with hexadecimal color
codes or clever Twitter handles. It starts with audience. Here’s a process we
use, share and find valuable.
Start with Audience
Who do you reach, and who do you want to reach? Who can you
reasonably expect to reach? Then ask what you know about them. Where do they
get their information? What formats do they find useful? What stories do they
read – or what videos do they watch, podcasts they listen to, etc.?
If you don’t know, ask. Make some phone calls. Send out a
three-question survey. Look at your web traffic and newsletter stats. See what
people use and value and what they ignore. Look for discrepancies between who
you think your audience is and who they really are. (If, for instance, you
think your audience is primarily farmers and ranchers and every email address
you’ve collected ends in .edu, there’s something wrong.)
Also, recognize your audience isn’t some monolithic entity.
Define the audience for your overall communication strategy, but recognize that
within that there will be elements you can best reach in different ways. We
identify a specific audience for each different communication vehicle we use
and look for specific ways to target each group we want to reach.
Know Your Message
Message is the one or two sentence key idea you’re trying to
communicate with each piece you publish. It’s the one point or idea or
impression you want a reader to remember if they remember nothing else. It
should be simple and direct: “We fund grant research.” “We add value to IPM
programs.” “We have pest-management answers.” The more clearly you know your
message, the more clearly you can communicate it.
(FYI, the message for this blog post is “Start with
audience.”)
Have a Purpose
Purpose is the specific thing you’re trying to accomplish
with each communication piece. It’s what you want to provide your audience –
how to reach your program, what types of grants or services you have available,
what you’ve accomplished in the past year. It’ll support your message but go
beyond it.
In a perfect world, we’d do all these things first – define
and develop the audience, message and purpose – and only then decide on medium,
content and design.
Choose the Right
Medium
A common place where communication strategies fail is when
someone starts with the medium rather than an audience. “We need to be on
Twitter,” “We should do an app,” “We have to update these brochures” are all
perfectly reasonable statements and all perfectly wrong if that’s not what your
audience needs, uses or wants.
Be on Twitter if the people you’re trying to reach are on
Twitter (and use Twitter for what you’re doing). Print a brochure or flier if
you're trying to reach people who don’t have good Internet access and need
hardcopy documents. Shoot video if there’s a specific audience you believe will
get your message that way.
The advice from the baseball movie “Field of Dreams” – build
it and they will come – doesn’t work for communicators. We have to go where the
audience is, not expect them to come to us.
Keep the Content
Focused
One of the great things about working through the
audience-message-purpose process is not only does it guide you about what to
include in a communications piece, it helps you see what you can leave out. And
if something doesn’t serve your audience, support your message and further your
purpose, leave it out. People are
busy. We’re competing for their time so the more clearly, quickly and concisely
we can give them the information they need, the better.
Do Design Last
This doesn’t mean design isn’t important, it just means it
comes last in the process. And doing it last leads to better design, because
then your designer can choose formats, fonts, images, everything to support all
the work you’ve already done. The design is aimed at a specific audience,
visually reinforces your message and clearly communicates the purpose. It makes
for a better, more effective piece.
Finally, Try this Self-Evaluation
Exercise
A while back, we developed a survey to see how other
programs communicated – what methods they used, what audiences they targeted
and how they measured the effectiveness of their efforts. As a survey, it was too long and complex and I’d have been better off just making
phone calls.
As a self-evaluation tool, however, it turned out to be
really effective. Everyone who took the survey said they were going to change
some aspect of their communication strategy as a result. So we edited and
shortened and reconceived the survey as a reflective, self-directed evaluation
tool; a way to systematically work through all the ways you communicate and see
if they’re working as well as they could.
You could do the exercise as a group – a leadership team and
communicators – or individually. Save and print your answers at the end because
nothing is stored or shared. It can take an hour or maybe longer if there’s a
lot to think over and talk about, but communicating well is worth the time. Here’s the link.
But if you’re not keen on doing that, here’s a shortcut:
Start with audience.
