The Equity Centered Communications Brand Manifesto
In this post, I’ll share what inspired the creation of ECC, why communications efforts often fail in public and social impact spaces, and how you can counter that trend and help your organization maximize your impact.
TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) Version:
Programs that don’t get utilized eventually lose their funding.
When people don’t know about programs, they won’t/can't use them.
Spending money on communications consultants does not mean they will be successful in increasing program/service utilization.
Success metrics that comms firms sell you on like “# of impressions” and “% social media increases” don’t do anything for your bottom line/program success.
You have to put your end users/audience/community at the center of communications and marketing design.
When you put people at the center, you will see results.
It’s better to do equitable human centered (HCD) design and marketing than traditional approaches to design and communications.
The Consequence of Not Communicating
When I started working in social impact and government sectors I noticed a troubling trend. Millions were spent on developing state of the art services, programs, and community supports, yet they would go underutilized. The result? Amazing services would eventually have their budgets slashed, due to under-utilization. Similarly, private sector social impact companies developed great products but failed to build a sustainable funding stream or customer base.
So I began to ask why… Why do great programs go unused? Why do communications firms fail to deliver results? Why do impressions and social media matter if no-one is using our services?
What I found won’t surprise you, but maybe it will start to explain why your prior efforts have struggled to create traction with your end-users.
In most cases, people didn’t know about the service being offered. I know, not a very revolutionary conclusion, but think about it for a minute. Most of the services offered had expensive communications campaigns behind them. Thousands of dollars in digital advertising spend, thousands more on “consulting hours” without any clear results. So how is it that well-meaning communications professionals could spend so much time and effort (and budget) yet end up with poor results? The secret lies in the approach. In most cases, comms professionals follow best practices, but they don’t help organizations connect with the people they’re trying to reach.
Costly Firms With No Results
In my experience, quite a few comms firms weren’t willing to be accountable to specific results either. They’d tout “high impressions” (the number of people who see an ad/post) or percentage increases in social media followers. However, these metrics don’t do much to increase the number of people using your services.
Imagine you are trying to share a resource for parents at-risk of involvement with the foster system and you hire a firm to spread the word. They come back and tell you that 1 million people in your area saw their digital ad campaign, but you only have 15 parents sign up. How could this be?!? The fact is, broad-brush approaches like this may get you in front of a lot of people, but they don’t get you in front of the actual people you are trying to reach.
The same goes for social media. I once had a firm (that cost a significant portion of a program’s budget) claim success because they increased social media followers by 500%! Sounds fantastic right? The fine print on that stat was they went from 10 to 50 followers. Needless to say, this was hardly a marker of a successful campaign.
We aren’t here to rag on other comms firms. We share this to point out how traditional methods and best practices just don’t work the same for social impact and public sector spaces. Instead, we need to leverage innovative, cutting edge ideas to get real results. Innovation for innovation's sake isn’t enough, however. Plenty of well-meaning “innovators” have done a lot of harm in our communities. Innovative practices must put equity, and people at the center, to be effective and prevent harm.
Putting People at the Center to Improve Outcomes
So how can you get more from your communications and marketing efforts in an equitable way? You have to put the people you are trying to reach at the center. This doesn’t mean you have your communications partners think about what your end-user might want, it means directing them to speak with your end-users to learn more about what they want, how they perceive your organization, and how they’d like you to connect with them.
An example, I once worked with an organization in the Foster Care innovation space. I was asked to help explore why a prevention program wasn’t being used by community members despite the organization sharing it as a resource on their website. A few user engagement sessions, using human-centered and ethnographic principles quickly revealed that 1.) their users were entirely unaware of the program, 2) those users hadn’t been to the website, and 3) their users prefer to receive information through their local support groups and community networks. In this case, traditional communications best practices failed, but innovative human centered principles led to an increased understanding of the people we were trying to reach, and improved strategies for connecting them with services.
In another instance, I was tasked with finding ways to get information to employees within the client organization. This was an organization of several thousand employees with complex org structures, that was hoping to improve culture and get supportive resources to staff. After multiple listening sessions with employees across all levels, we found that prior attempts to “streamline” communications, while intended to reduce inbox clutter, also cut valuable information channels. Through design sessions with front line staff, program leaders, and executives, we were able to create internal communications practices that made employees feel like a part of a work family, boosting morale and increasing bottom-up innovation.
What You Can Do Today
So what can you do today to improve your marketing and communications, to help you better serve your communities, make your teams happier, and increase your organization’s impact? While we think you should work with us, we also want you to know the basics so you can give it a go yourself. These are not tightly held industry secrets, but rather principles that we hope become more commonplace, so good work doesn’t fail to make an impact.
To learn more about what you can do to improve your efforts today, check out our “5 Principles for Equitable and Effective Communications”
