Communication planning

Demonstrate the value of your communications

Diane Gayeski, Ph.D., offers a model for making the link

Diane Gayeski wants communicators to change their titles.

“Be a complexity reducer, not an information producer,” she suggested years ago at an IABC District 5 conference.… Read the full article

Slip the measures he needs in with the ones he wants

By Angela Sinickas, ABC, Diva of Diagnostics

Executives can be stubborn about having you measure what they want, even if it may not help them reach their objectives.… Read the full article

How to tie communications to your organization’s business success

When it comes to measuring your communication’s success, there are two ways to do it: the easy way and the Ann Wylie way.… Read the full article

Global literacy is falling. What’s a communicator to do?

Read it and weep: After decades of reporting five levels of literacy, the largest adult literacy study in the world has dropped Level 5, the top level, for lack of participation.… Read the full article

Writing in the right direction

Create written communication guidelines

Ever wish you had a reference tool you could hand off to new team members to answer the question, “How do we write around here?”

How about a resource you could use to show serial offenders how to fix label headlines, passive voice or leads that are more likely to get readers to take a nap than to take action?… Read the full article

Think like the audience

How do top organizations communicate?

Seventy-one percent of high-performing organizations focus their messaging on audience’s point of view. Just 45% of average organizations do.

Or so says Stephen Welch, president of IABC UK and an independent consultant.… Read the full article

Measure what matters

You’re not still basing success on page views, are you?

I got into a little Twitter tiff — is that a Twiff? — with an SEO expert recently after I suggested in a workshop that writers optimize for humans first and Google second.… Read the full article

Tattoos, water balloons and green bananas

Spread the word like Sagmeister & Walsh

For a show at the contemporary art gallery Deitch Projects in 2008, designer Stefan Sagmeister stacked 10,000 bananas against a wall.… Read the full article

Bad news works in safety communications

Tell employees how close they are to killing someone

In 1931, a man named Herbert William Heinrich noticed something odd about accidents.

Heinrich’s Law

An inspector for Travelers Insurance Company, Heinrich spent his days looking at clients’ accident rates and found a ratio.… Read the full article

Against the law

Law professor argues that legalese is bad for business

Law professor Joseph Kimble believes that legalese costs business and government a fortune, that “bequeaths” says nothing that “gives” does not, that simple language is more precise than legal language and that plain language “beats legalese in every way with readers.”

His treatise on the topic, “Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please,” is a must for every communicator’s library.… Read the full article