Less Chatter, More Matter: The Communications Podcast

#105 The three questions you should ask before communicating

• Season 1 • Episode 105

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Not everything needs a comms plan, and not every comms plan needs to be extensive.

On this week's episode of the Less Chatter, More Matter podcast, we explain away how you can easily outline and specify your comms before you even start. In fact, we share three essential questions every communicator should ask before crafting their messages.

We all have busy schedules and information overload, meaning both communicators and audiences have little time for unclear, over the top or irrelevant messaging. 

By taking a few moments to consider these key questions, you can ensure your communication is clear, engaging, and effective—without the need for a full-blown comms plan. So, why wouldn't you spare yourself the workload and listen in for our simple three questions?


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Mel:

We are all busy people, so when we communicate, we often don't take the time to sit back and think before putting pen to paper, so to speak. The result is our communication often misses the mark. Why? Well, because we haven't thought about our audience first. We've just thought about what we want to say. And the problem with that is miscommunication, which causes confusion and conflict and helps nobody. So, if you are time poor and you need to communicate something that requires a bit of thought, what's the solution? That's what today's episode is all about. Insert intro music. Hi friend, and welcome to another episode of Less Chatter, More Matter, The Communications Podcast. I'm your host, Mel Loy, and I'm recording this episode on the lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin, Brisbane. In today's episode, I'm going to give you some top tips on how to prepare your communication so it's effective, but without putting hours into developing a fully blown comms plan. There's two reasons for this. Number one, as I said in the intro, you are no doubt a busy person with very little time to sit and plan your next piece of communication. And number two, your audience is also busy. They are very busy people. They also have very little time and they have very little patience for communication that isn't clear and isn't relevant. When those two problems combine, we have communication that just isn't effective and just becomes another email or message in a very long list of all the messages we receive every single day. So I'm going to share just three questions you need to ask yourself before you start drafting your comms. So grab a pen and paper or get the notes app ready on your phone and let's get amongst it. Question number one, what do you want your audience to know, feel, and do? Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, or you've read my book, or even just been following me on socials, you know, I bang on about this one all the time. And I have to, because it's the one thing that people keep forgetting about. So this is about being clear on what you want to achieve from your communication and working backwards from there. Essentially start with the end in mind. And it's about putting your audience hat on and thinking about things from their perspective after they've engaged with your message, whether it's a presentation, an email, a video, whatever it is, what new knowledge should they have? What action do they need to take? And importantly, how do you want them to feel about that? Now, the feel part is usually where we make a mistake because the fact is, if people don't feel confident in taking the action you want to take, Uh, they're confused or they just even feel a bit angry, then they won't do what you want them to do. So, how do you make them feel positive about your message so it encourages them to retain that knowledge and take action? There's a few things to consider here. Number one, are you actually the right person to send the message? Now we know from so much research that the messenger is often more important than the message itself. There is a bias called the messenger effect, and it means we tend to be more influenced by who is communicating, rather than the content of their message. It comes down to things like likeability. Do I like this person? Are they credible and expertise? There's also the authority bias where we're likely to take an action requested of us by an expert or an authority figure, even if we disagree with the request. And there's plenty of experiments that show that in action. It's quite scary. You'll find this one actually to be more prominent in cultures with very hierarchical structures. And one of the bias to mention here is the halo effect, which means we tend to unfairly give people more positive thought if we've had a first good impression. So the authority bias, the messenger effect, and the halo effect, these all will play into whether or not you actually the right messenger to get your audience to listen to what you have to say. The second piece here is the language you use is super important. It should be simple, authentic, and tailored to your audience. Use the words they speak. Speak about the things that matter to them and don't use jargon and corporate speak. And number three is use a tone that is approachable, but professional. There is always a balance between being concise and then potentially being too blunt. So think about the tone you use and how that could make your audience feel. So it's about being polite, respectful. And if you're not sure of the tone, ask somebody else to read your message first. Okay. Question number two is what level of knowledge do they actually have about your topic? Not what you think they have. Now, too often over the last 20 plus years, I've been doing this. I've heard things like, I sent an email, so they should know about this. Or we spoke about this at the team meeting or there was an intranet article about this. Why don't they? No. Why don't they listen? Basically, what's happened is somebody has broadcast something rather than communicated a message, and they expect that of the hundreds of messages we receive every day, their message stood out and was absolutely the most important and was definitely remembered. Guess what? It doesn't work that way. So that's one part of the equation is thinking you've communicated when you haven't. The second part is the assumed knowledge. So you forget that people don't have the same context or level of expertise that you do. And this happens quite a bit I've seen with strategies. So senior leaders live and breathe. Strategy development for months on end, and then they forget that those further down the chain haven't had that same level of involvement, and so they can't understand why their team members don't know about it or can't explain the strategy. I often sit with technical experts too, like IT people, engineers, mathematicians, data scientists, et cetera. They forget that not everyone has the same level of technical expertise, so they don't explain things simply and tend to use a lot of technical language. Now, if you want to see an example of an organisation that deals with a lot of technical stuff, but communicates really well, I highly recommend you check out the Australian Bureau of Statistics on the socials. They do an excellent job of making things meaningful for Joe public. So definitely check them out. So rather than assume the kind of knowledge you think your audience has, find out exactly what they know first. So that means having conversations, whether it's with team leaders or team members or customers, whoever your audience is, and get an understanding of what they know already. Because once you know that, then you can start to plan and develop your communication so it will be more effective. And some of the ways you can do that are number one, communicate from the audience's perspective. So make it about them, not about you or the business. So what that means is rather than talking about whatever the topic means for business, talk about what it means for different teams or different roles. The second piece here is to make complex ideas relatable. Now there's a lot of different ways you can do this. One way is to use analogies. So for example, if you're changing from an old customer database to a new one and you need people to do the training, you could use an analogy like this is like upgrading from the film camera to the latest digital high res camera. But just having a better camera doesn't make you a better photographer. This is where this training comes in. Okay, so something like that. And the third piece you could try here is using visuals. So graphs and infographics are great for helping people to get a quick and clear understanding of your message. While they don't have to be created by a graphic designer, they should tell a clear story. So be clear yourself on what the key message is from that visual and create it to get that effect. Okay, the final of the three questions. Why should they care? Here's the thing. Nobody cares as much about your project as you do. Absolutely nobody. So when I hear people say they need to communicate project updates to big audiences, I probably age about three years every time. Because it's a complete waste of time. Not only are people busy, but they have their own priorities. So if you're going to communicate, then you need to show why it's relevant for that audience. Why should they care? Maybe there is a specific action that they need to take or that's relevant to them. Maybe there are benefits for them that they should know about, whatever that looks like. But if you genuinely can't give a good answer to the question, why should they care? Then you're going to be hard pressed to engage people in your message. The flip side is that you might have a really long list of ideas that you think are really relevant and interesting to your audience. And that's fine, but too many ideas is going to be overwhelming and confusing. So you need to distill that down to what are the core messages for your audience. And in some cases that will be different messages for different audiences. Now, how do you know what to keep and what to ditch? You want to keep the information that's got specific relevance to your audience. And that's critical. And by critical, I mean that without it, they wouldn't be able to act or understand why they need to do something. Everything else is just filler information or extra details that could be put into a list of FAQs. For example. Another good rule of thumb here is to work in threes, so we know our brains love to detect patterns and that we can only retain so much information at any one time. So if you have a lot of messages or points you want to get across, just find the top three that are most relevant to your audience. Okay, short episode today, and it is time for your episode recap. So today we talked about the three questions you should ask if you want your communication to be effective. And we talked about it because everyone is time poor, both the communicator and the audience. And that means we have to find ways to be efficient, but effective. The three questions were number one, what do you want your audience to know, feel, and do? This is about having a clear outcome and starting with the end in mind. Number two, what level of knowledge does your audience have? Not what you think they have. This is where you need to find out what people actually know about your topics so that you don't assume they have what they need to make a good decision or take action. And number three, why should they care? This is partly the WIIFM principle, what's in it for me, but it's also about making sure there's a reason why you are communicating in the first place. It needs to be relevant and useful to your audience to cut through the noise. All right, team. Well, that's all we've got time for today. Thank you so much for listening in. And by the way, don't forget, you can always sign up to my fortnightly update in that we do a recap of the episodes that we've done in the last couple of weeks and blog posts, but also the latest news from the comms world and upcoming events as well. So you don't wanna miss that. The link is in the show notes also. Some of these tips are included in my new book and expanded in a lot more detail, obviously. And if you want to find out more about the new book and pop your name down on the wait list, head to lesschattermorematter. com. That's it for today. Keep doing amazing things and bye for now.