Communications has three spheres of influence: Knowledge, attitudes and behaviour.

Combining message expertise with increasing complexity in channel navigation – Strategic Communications helps to distill and plant an idea among an audience with maximum impact and influence. The greater the reach, the greater the weight, and the more you’ll want to get this message and mix right.

Knowledge and complex understanding

You’ll need communications expertise when the subject matter is too technical or complicated for your audience to understand. If you’ve tried and hit a brick wall with your audience not interested, or unable to gather the magnitude of what you’re conveying – it’s likely your message is off.

It needs to be distilled better and explained clearer with greater imagery, metaphor and analogy. This includes or technical content matter such as finance, legal or construction issues.

It also includes science communication such as climate change, and importantly complex social issues that don’t always have a beginning, middle and end, such as domestic violence, intergenerational poverty and indeed racism.

Attitude

You’ll also need communications expertise and advice for when your organisation is seeking to shift attitudes that are too important to get wrong or too risky to miss. For companies, this is the case in building trust in your business, employee trust in your CEO/exec and consumer loyalty to your brand.

This is particularly important when an industry is drawn to media light for corruption and abuse, or in risk mitigation to help withstand a possible scandal or production line crisis. At this point, you’ll want to have all the stops in place for boosting trust in your organisation and management to bounce back and navigate crisis.

Attitude change is also invaluable when seeking to introduce a controversial policy on taxation issues, launch policy platforms for voter interest, or ask employees to comply with new health and safety matters such as vaccinations.

When the matters are too important not to get right. When it’s vital that people look positively to these matters, communications expertise is going to be crucial.

Behaviour

When the behaviour can be best swayed by communication alone, you are also going to want expert comms advice. There are many interventions that can be used to shape our behaviour and “nudge” us in one direction. That be economics, UX design or urban developments. In some cases, it can be as simple as a slogan or additional line in a letter that will help encourage a citizen to pay their tax on time, book an appointment with their doctor, or to choose eco-friendly option.

Working with behaviour scientists at this point, is a good starting place to identify what role communications can play and when it’s the intervention required.

Roll it out

You may just need your content experts or executives to be trained, coupled by a review of channel mix put in place. Or you may need someone to be constantly reviewing refining and building this if you’re growing at a fast rate.

Either way, get someone on board. Check the message. Check the channels. Get the measures in place. And then go back for reviews when you’re ready to grow this further. Everything can be overcomplicated, but making sure the things that matter most to your business and organisation are ticked off is vital to having impact and not wasting effort in getting it wrong.

Community engagement

Some researchers and practitioners particularly focus on the importance of communications to engage communities genuinely. They do so by facilitating dialogue with stakeholders and working towards avenues for democratic participation and growing shared understanding.

This is a further emerging space that gained traction and value among large scale developments and efforts for increased democratic participation.