Message management

To my mind there are a few key elements to a message or marketing strategy. In rough order of priority, the key elements are:

1. Learn and listen to your audience before you speak. When you talk about what you find important, you have to connect it to what they find important.
2. Provide the value proposition: a clear, deliverable message that says what you want to say in a way your audience can hear it. The value proposition should identify a pain point for your audience and explain how you, or what you offer, will help make the pain go away.
3. Include a call to action (do this, contribute that). The action should be clear, do-able (“sign this petition” not “end injustice!”) and if possible make the audience member who acts feel good for having acted and more ready to act again.
4. Persist, but don’t pester. For each audience there is an ideal frequency of communications so that each contact reinforces your message and strengthens your connection with that audience. Less than that, and you drop out of memory; more than that, and you are a stalker.
5. Follow through (technical excellence, in that your communication should be of the highest quality you can achieve; timeliness, so you aren’t talking about stuff that’s going to happen so soon on the heels of you talking about it that your audience can’t react) and follow up. When people respond to your message (with a question, a suggestion, a contribution) you need to be ready to respond right back (with thanks, thoughtful response, suggestion of a way to become more active…). Keep a record of what you said, and what got a good (or a bad!) response.
6. Maintain message discipline. Everyone should stay on-message, without sounding like echoes. If you get asked a tricky question, it may be to trick you into an exploitable answer. We don’t need to be the first hose at every fire--it’s often better to get the facts right and make sure what you’re going to say meshes what the campaign is saying, rather than flail in front of the microphones. If you’re not an official spokesperson but you must speak out, make clear you are speaking for yourself.

I started to write this some time back, as I became more and more concerned about the messaging by a group that is very important to me. The current leadership of that group seems to focus obsessively on maintaining message discipline, which is the least important element of them all. The focus, after all, should be on communicating, not on controlling. 

If you are truly communicating, you have to be open to surprises. If what you have to say is important, it will survive occasional errors in the way you say it.