‘The problem with communication … is the illusion that it has been accomplished.’
George Bernard Shaw said this, and what a wise old dude he was! We spend a fortune on communication. We print lovely glossy brochures, we make films, we host seminars, we cascade information through our organisations and then we assume that we have communicated, and more importantly we assume that our audience has heard us and understood what we wanted them to understand.
I had a friend who was organising a golf day for the local community charity. He carefully had lots of nice posters printed and then stuck them up in every single pub in his part of town. Result – not one person phoned up to take part. Why? Who knows? (Sorry there aren’t many answers this week, or even many opinions, just observations). Maybe being in a pub, people were too inebriated by the end of the night to remember they’d seen the poster. Maybe there wasn’t a single person in any of these establishments that liked golf, or maybe the poster (carefully drafted as it was) just didn’t convey the information he wanted it to in a way that made the people that saw it want to act.
Those of us who work in communication can sometimes get so wrapped up in the creative process that we forget to think fully about how those communications might be received. Communication is a two way process and if we forget our audience for even a minute then we aren’t doing our jobs properly. Film can help communication by presenting arguments simply and clearly, and engage with both sides of the argument, as Scottish Water did when building the Glasgow Water Treatment Works in Milngavie. Alternatively of course, as communicators we can all just be down-right bloody minded, and this is genius.
These days people communicate entirely differently with each other than they did even five years ago. Often we don’t even speak on the phone any more, we set up social engagements by text message and even then use a condensed form of langusge. People don’t want long-winded documents to read anymore. They don’t want long winding films, they want their communication short, to the point and entertaining, then they’ll listen.
I think however you decide to communicate, and clearly we believe that visual communications can play a hugely important part in any comms strategy, the most important thing is to communicate in a way that makes sure you are heard and more importantly understood and acted on.
