Activity vs Impact
Most communications strategies fail silently. They continue to operate long after they have stopped achieving anything useful. The problem is not a lack of activity. Organisations with failing communications strategies are usually the busiest. They produce newsletters, press releases, and social media updates. The output looks impressive. The impact is minimal. The difference between activity and impact is measurement. Without it, you can mistake busyness for success for years.
Sign 1: You Do Not Know Who Your Audience Is
If you are communicating to ‘the public’ or ‘stakeholders’ without being able to describe their specific concerns, incentives, and information channels, your messages will not land. Effective communication is always targeted. It speaks to a specific person with a specific problem.
When we audit communications strategies, we often find the first crack here. The organisation has a vague sense of who they want to reach, but they cannot describe that audience with precision. They cannot name the primary concern of a procurement officer in their target space. They do not know how a government counterpart prefers to receive information. They assume all stakeholders want the same message.
If your strategy describes your audience in abstract terms, you are not ready to communicate.
Sign 2: You Have No Clear Success Metric
If your goal is ‘increase awareness’ or ‘improve perception’ without defining what that means in measurable terms, you have no way to know whether you are succeeding. A good communications strategy articulates what behaviour change or knowledge shift you are aiming for, and how you will know when you have achieved it.
‘Increase awareness of our ESG commitment’ is not a success metric. ‘Increase the percentage of investors who understand our climate risk management approach from 40 per cent to 60 per cent by the end of the quarter’ is a success metric. The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between guessing and knowing whether your communications are working.
Sign 3: You Are Not Monitoring How Your Messages Land
You publish communications and move on. You do not listen to how audiences are interpreting them. You do not adjust when the response is not what you expected. This is the fastest path to irrelevance.
Monitoring does not require sophisticated analytics. It requires listening. Read comments on your social posts. Talk to your audience directly. Ask for feedback. Notice when your message does not land the way you expected. The best communication strategies include a feedback loop in which you continuously learn how your audience interprets what you say.
Sign 4: Your Communications Are Disconnected From Your Programme
You do communications over here and deliver programme outcomes over there. They are not reinforcing each other. Communications are not seen as essential to implementation. It is treated as an extra layer that adds cost but not value.
This usually happens when communications are managed separately from programme management. Communications happen in one room; programme delivery happens in another. They do not talk to each other. The programme team does not see communications as their responsibility. The communications team does not understand the programme deeply enough to communicate it with credibility.
The organisations that communicate well integrate communications into programme design and implementation from day one.
Sign 5: Your Communications Team Does Not Have Access to Decision Makers
Communication is consulted after decisions are made, not before. This means you are managing outcomes instead of shaping them. You are defending positions instead of building support. This is reactive communication, and it is exhausting.
When communication has a seat at the decision-making table, the quality of decisions improves. Communications can flag reputational risks early. Communications can surface stakeholder concerns that the programme team was unaware of. Communications can suggest sequencing that builds support rather than resistance.
If your communications team is only consulted once decisions are made, they are playing a losing game.
What to Do About This
If any of these sound familiar, your communications strategy needs urgent review. The good news is that fixing communications is usually cheaper than managing the consequences of not fixing them. Most organisations can shift from activity-based to impact-based communications relatively quickly once they decide to do it.
