Developing communications for your organisation
This summer WAO ties a bow around a body of work we’ve been doing together with the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC). This initiative is hosted at MIT and has member universities from around the world.
The Digital Credentials Consortium is advancing the use and understanding of portable, verifiable digital credentials in higher education through open source technology development and leadership, research, and advocacy.
The DCC plays a pivotal role in the definition and establishment of the W3C Verifiable Credentials Standard. Standards are often invisible, but they are massively important!
In this post, we’ll use our work with the DCC to help you systematically review your communication initiatives and give you a bit of a playbook on how to develop reusable communication assets and resources.
Understanding your audience
Research
When crafting communications strategies, most organisations miss a crucial step: audience research. Implementing lessons from outdated research or making assumptions about audience only to find out that your assumptions were wrong are two mistakes that you can avoid!
Before we started creating communication messaging and assets for the DCC, we did two rounds of interviews. In both rounds, we spoke one-to-one with people deeply involved in the DCC’s work. In the first round, we spoke with staff members, W3C task group members and people already implementing the Verifiable Credentials standard. In the second round, we talked to members of the DCC and with the Leadership Board. We asked the same questions for both rounds, but allowed for organic conversation to emerge.
These interviews not only provided us with a bounty of onboarding and understanding to the DCC’s multitude of work, but it helped us identify, specifically, what stakeholders need and want from the DCC.
Segmentation
Once you have collected insights from your audience, you can begin to reflect those insights back in ways that help others understand who your audience is. Segmentation is a way to find overlapping interests and topics. We like to visualise segmentation and have done so in multiple ways, from our Audience Ikigai to Defining the Cast and Persona Spectrums, we use a couple of different tools to find audience overlaps. Figuring out a visual way to explain your audience and their unique needs and insights is a great way to help people feel connected to your organisation.
Crafting your communications
Being specific
Understanding your audience will help you tailor your messages and customise content to specific segments of your audience. Through research, you are also creating relationships with your audience and can encourage people to feel open to giving you feedback.
Our research and subsequent analysis helped us see trends and patterns to pay attention to as we began to craft communications for the DCC. We also identified some quick intervention points allowing us to immediately implement small changes and quick wins. For example, before we ran our final interview, we implemented a new README for the DCC’s Github organisation. Small wins can have big impact!
Our onboarding and research activities helped us see where there were misunderstandings, so that we could deal with them as quickly as possible.
Design guidelines
It can be helpful to put what we call “Design Constraints” in place when we’re building communication strategies and initiatives. Design Constraints are simply rules you and your colleagues use to create consistency in both visual and written language. For example, we helped the DCC select a colour palette, fonts and an illustration library for their future communications.
A brand guide is an example of visual design constraints. A “key messaging and wording” section in your communications strategy is another. It helps create consistency, so that your audiences know how you wish to communicate your organisational goals.
Growing your audience
Engagement
You want to engage with people strategically so that you can work sustainably and your communications are aligned with your current initiatives and goals. We use several tools to help us figure out the best way to engage with a specific audience or community. We’ve written often about the Architecture of Participation, our go-to framework for creating participatory communities.
We also like to build Contributor Pathways, which help show how different stakeholders engage with a project. These pathways can outline steps different audience take and where you might be able to engage with them more effectively.
There are four stages to the engagement model we like to use:
- Awareness — The first stage invites you to think about how your particular group hears about you or your project for the first time. The questions to as are How do they hear about us and how would we like them to hear about us?
- First Engagement — Stage two identifies the first interaction a person or a group has with you or your project. What is the first action that they take and what action would you like them to take?
- Build Relationship — Stage three is about your interaction. How do you build relationships with people or groups and what value can you bring?
- Deepen Engagement — As people deepen their engagement with your organisation or project, you’ll want to show them that they’re valued. So how can you ensure consistent engagement with your most engaged audiences?
We think about each of these stages in reference to each specific audience group, as some audiences might be more or less engaged than others.
Advocacy
WAO tends to work with groups and organisations that are trying to create a better world. Advocacy is an integral part of our work. There are a variety of advocacy and collaboration strategies as well as best practices that you can use to ensure you are able to promote your messages in a way that lead to action.
In this post on campaigning for the right things, we take a deep dive into using an advocacy framework to figure out where we might focus efforts. You can reapply this framework to your own initiatives!
Building and sustaining engagement
Cadence
If you’ve truly understood your audiences through research and analysis and you’ve determined the messages and design constraints you need to utilise for maximum communication effectiveness, your audience will begin to grow. Yay! You are building engagement!
It’s time to find sustainable ways to keep your engagement going. Probably the most effective strategy we have for sustaining engagement is cadence and consistency.
You need to establish a cadence to your engagement efforts both so that your growing audience knows what to expect and so that you and your team can stay sane. It’s simple, but a communication schedule will help you be consistent, so that people stay engaged. Check out our how to be a great moderator post too, it has good tips on building consistency into your workflow.
Commitment
Last, but not least, commitment to your goals, team and community are essential. However it is that you are trying to have impact on the world, it is a marathon, not a sprint. We believe that open, flexible strategies with reusable and adaptable assets are a great way to help you stay committed.
🔥 Do you need help with communications and engagement? Get in touch!