"We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak." – Epictetus
by Dave Worsell
The ancient Greeks nailed it ages ago, but it took me a while to grasp the true value of listening – I mean really listening to those with the most valuable things to say.
Communication pros often focus on delivering messages, but not enough time is spent on understanding how those messages are received and understood. It's a subtle yet crucial point.
Back in early 2020 BC (before Covid), I stumbled upon Hello Lamp Post at the Mayor of London’s Tech For Good Challenge. This quirky AI platform encourages people to have conversations with physical objects and infrastructure, in the public places they live, work, and visit. These interactions can be witty, whimsical, and thought-provoking, depending on the design and objectives.
Government worldwide struggle to engage across all sectors of their community. Middle-aged, middle-income residents are generally easier to engage, but it's the under-served and under-represented groups that often need government support the most, yet they are often overlooked and excluded. Hello Lamp Post offers a unique way to reach, engage, and understand these crucial audiences.
Now, let's get back to Epictetus and his ears. Prior to joining the Hello Lamp Post team I saw far too many campaigns and engagement programmes engineered to deliver a specific message, give people information or, my absolute bugbear, to simply “raise awareness”. We’ve discovered one way communications often have very limited impact and extremely difficult to measure success.
I remember a presentation I gave at the European Parliament alongside the wonderful Eddie Coates-Madden where we told a shocked audience they were wasting their money on ineffective “awareness campaigns” and using “vanity metrics” to justify the expense. We argued they shouldn’t invest in future “awareness” campaigns if they didn’t have a reliable method of measuring outcomes and ensuring they reached the right audience. Unfortunately this bad communication practice continues in the UK, EU and beyond. Sigh!
The UK’s Government Communication Service (GCS) is making strides in measuring effectiveness, but many campaigns still lean heavily towards "raising awareness, as an outcome" which doesn't cut it for me as it’s the action taken not the awareness that matters. Clearly a step in the right direction and understandable given the tools and evaluations methods currently available to most communication and engagement teams.
But here's where Hello Lamp Post shines – it excels at listening. Sure, we're great at getting messages out, but being a conversational platform we also understand how those messages are received and understood. I could kick myself for not seeing it earlier in my journey but it took me ages to realise the full potential of what Hello Lamp Post can do. While reaching a diverse audience and delivering messages is an important part of it, the unique value is in how we listen and who we listen to.
For agencies like the Environment Agency (EA) invested in Flood Awareness and Preparedness campaigns, Hello Lamp Post is the platform that helps corroborate message reception, understanding, and action right at the heart of high-risk communities. Conversations with flood defences can reveal so much about community awareness and preparedness but also ensures EA has the ability to validate past and future capital expenditure on these critical flood alleviation schemes and the communication that goes with them.
"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while, he knows something"
Wilson Mizner
Hello Lamp Post completes the missing feedback loop in communication campaigns. Understanding the "understanding" allows you to validate, educate, re-educate, or modify messages for greater impact.
To truly understand our impact and provide deserving services to citizens, we need more conversations in our communication and engagement activities. So, let's listen more and speak less, as Vanilla Ice once said: "Stop, Collaborate, and Listen."
If you’re doing some great listening work and want to share then please let me know because I’m all ears.
Dave Worsell is an expert in Citizen Engagement, Digital & Mobile technology and head of commercial at Hello Lamp Post. You can say hello on Twitter at @DWorsell
