One size does not fit all.
When it comes to all your stakeholders, a homogenous communications and engagement approach, often centred around your digital platform(s), doesn’t always work.
While experienced comms people (yip: me) should/do know this in theory, it was driven home to me forcibly when I recently facilitated a series of focus groups comprising a range of ethnicities, cultures, ages, deciles and languages.
A wide-ranging, mish-mash of people, pretty much like you’d find in the membership database of many organisations.
We held the focus groups to help my client understand how to better engage with these incredibly diverse ‘communities’.
Two things quickly became clear:
- Some were vaguely happy with the mainstream – a bit of Facebook, the odd email, the ubiquitous newsletter, etc., but even they shrugged a bit at the thought of more of that kind of stale, pale, ‘mail’ comms approach. A bit ... well, meh!
- The majority wanted something else (and even the mainstreamers agreed with them). Rather than the usual boring stuff thru’ the inbox, they wanted a real person. And not a person on a screen, but a real live one who would talk with (note: not ‘to’) them, and with whom they could actually interact.
Which reminded me very much of my days as a young PR consultant.
On the few occasions I was allowed ‘out of my closet to visit a client’ (his words), we’d meet with one particular CEO whose whole approach – before ‘comms’ was a thing - was ‘management by walkabout’.
His mantra was ‘be seen often’, ‘press the flesh’, ‘talk their language, not mine’, ‘keep it simple, keep it real’.
Yes, we produced the (printed in those days) newsletter. Yes, we sent company-wide faxes (remember them?). We even had a staff suggestion box.
But the priority comms channel for this CEO was ‘talking to the troops, face to face’. And he had oiver 1,000 of them across three factory sites.
In the first staff satisfaction survey we ran for that client, we asked staff ‘on a scale of 1-10, how proud were they to work for the company’. Responses ranged between one and three.
By the time that CEO had ‘made the rounds’, ‘patted some backs’ and ‘walked the talk’ over a year, the answer to that same question ranged between six and nine.
There’s a comms lesson in that for all of us.
Those staff, like our focus group participants, wanted to hear from and engage with a real person; someone credible, who can relate to them as individuals, with whom they can develop a relationship.
Obviously organisational leaders can’t spend all their time communicating by walkabout, especially when you have a diverse and geographically far-flung constituency.
But it does pay to remember this valuable communications lesson from time to time.
A one size fits all (often digital) comms approach doesn’t always work for all the people. Especially in our increasingly multi-national, ethnically- and culturally-diverse society.
Sometimes, being seen, making the rounds and pressing the flesh can add immeasurable value to your communications and engagement activity.
It can inject personality and relatability into what can otherwise be regulation and often one-dimensional comms activity.
Why not give it a try.