Are you testing your campaigns, your comms collateral, your digital channels? Here’s why you should.
by George London
“I sent the article on to [senior stakeholder] and they’ve had a go at rewriting the introduction” Sigh
“[Manager’s husband] thinks we should put this on Instagram” Eye-roll
“Just wondering if we should get feedback from [group that meets once a month] on the tweet before it goes out” Existential crisis intensifies
As a comms professional, sometimes involving people in our work feels like the last thing we want to do. After all, everyone thinks they can write an email, don’t they?
Choose the right people to involve, though, and the impact of your communications and campaigns can be transformed.
To be clear, I’m not talking about running more focus groups with the accounts payable team to plan that new TikTok campaign. I’m talking about involving your audience.
There’s an old saying in advertising that “you are not your audience”, and I think the measurability of digital media has moved the dial in the right direction in terms of being more objective about what audiences want.
But too often we act as if engagement rates, clickthroughs and estimated impressions give us an insight into what people are actually thinking when they see our content.
Is that bounce rate high because your audience found what they were looking for immediately and moved on, or because they found your webpage confusing and gave up?
Are your campaign posts being shared because they are insightful and engaging – or because your audience think they are being patronised and want to show your comms catastrophe to their mates?
Introducing real life humans to the comms planning process does a lot to steer you in the right direction.
I was lucky enough to be working at NHS Digital when we transformed the old NHS Choices website into the NHS website.
Out went a journalistic approach to article writing and in came a laser focus on user needs over everything. Webpages got shorter and simpler as lab sessions with users boiled down impenetrable policy waffle into the stuff that actually mattered to them.
It wasn’t necessarily an easy transition. There’s nothing quite so humbling as sitting the other side of a mirror and seeing a member of the public tear down the painstakingly researched and expertly crafted content you’ve worked on for months.
Ultimately though, setting egos aside has paid huge dividends in terms of making complex health services and content easy to use. If you’ve ever flown through booking a vaccine appointment or doing something you expected to be complicated on GOV.UK in a matter of minutes, those user-centred principles are what will have underpinned your experience.
And the same doesn’t just go for digital services. In my current role at the Health Innovation Network (the Academic Health Science Network for south London), we spend most of our time on fairly complex programmes and projects supporting change in the NHS and social care.
Inevitably, from a communications perspective this can make it tricky to avoid falling into a morass of three-letter acronyms and reports impenetrable to anyone who hasn’t spent the past decade completely immersed in the topic at hand.
Keeping those jargon levels in check isn’t the primary objective of involving more patients, carers, people and communities in our work – but it certainly helps!
As an organisation we’ve committed to involving people and communities as equal partners in our projects through our Involvement Strategy; we’ve also recently welcomed two Lived Experience Partners to our team as staff members, which is an incredibly exciting step forward.
I’ve been at the Health Innovation Network for almost a year and the benefits of this approach have been striking.
Projects such as HEAL-D – a culturally-tailored programme to support people from black African and black Caribbean communities to self-manage diabetes – simply wouldn’t be possible without involving the intended audience in co-producing the programme right from the start.
And elsewhere, working with people has meant misguided assumptions have been unravelled early on in projects, changing the direction of work for the better and undoubtedly saving significant time and money down the line.
Involving people isn’t always easy; from procurement headaches to planning meetings around the busy lives of your “experts by experience”, it takes some real effort to make it happen. And to make things even more complicated, you probably won’t know exactly what the benefits of involving people will be until the project gets properly underway.
But I promise – there will be benefits, whether they are immediately, blindingly or (occasionally) embarrassingly obvious, or more nuanced.
Ceding control of our campaigns or content others doesn’t always come naturally to us comms folk. But sometimes it’s exactly what we need to do.
Let’s say no to assumptions, second-hand hypotheses, and “helpful suggestions” from the senior stakeholder’s niece who did a PR internship 10 years ago – and yes to involving people and communities effectively in shaping our work.
George London is head of communications at the Health Innovation Network. You can say hello on Twitter at @GeorgeLondon89
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