The call came with a note of desperation: “We’re launching this program in two weeks and we need a website for it. I don’t really have a budget. I know something quick and cheap isn’t going to be the best, but we can fix it later. Can you help?”

The answer was no. Not because we didn’t want to help, but because we just can’t summon the creative energy for lost causes. There’s nothing more depressing (for all concerned) than a project that starts out rushed, underfunded, and ill-conceived, with the dream of better times ahead. Those times almost never arrive. The hard truth is, you can’t build a mansion on the foundation for a shack.

Prevention Beats Treatment
Our best advice is, avoid this no-win situation. Communications planning should start at the beginning of a program, product, or service launch. You may not know exactly what you’ll be offering, but you know you’ll have to communicate about it, and you know which audiences you’ll need to reach. Carve out the time and budget to think through your strategy, messages, and tactics so that you can produce materials that spur success and make you look good.

Need motivation? Remember what we all know about first impressions—your audiences may not give you a chance to make it better later.

What’s Plan B?
OK, so you’re already at the dope-slap stage (“Doh! I forgot about communications!”) or you’ve inherited a mess. What can you do?

Make time. See if you can squeeze the administrative end for more creative time. If other people got you into this situation, let them know they have to help you get out of it, with immediate vendor approvals, tight review times, whatever it takes. If you did this to yourself, beg for mercy.

Find some money. Look under the couch cushions if you have to, but don’t waste more time on the delusion that you’ll get something for nothing. Remember the rule: fast, cheap, and good are all attainable qualities, but you usually can’t get more than two of them at once.

Think small and short term. Recognize that with a tight budget, short time frame, and no planning, you are not going to create a website or anything else for the ages. Keep design and technical aspects simple and copy short but smart. Don’t spend an extra dime on features to build on—you don’t want to build on this; you just want to meet the immediate need.

Start Fresh
We all have to go the down-and-dirty route at some time or another. The real mistake is trying to make the result serve your ongoing communications needs. All the swine-related clichés apply: you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, you can put lipstick on a pig but it’s still a pig, etc. You’ll get far better results if you put the pig out in the pen and build your new communication tools the right way. Originally published in Words That Work, July 2007.

You’ve got it all going on: carefully crafted position papers, an e-mail activist network, troubling statistics, an encyclopedic Web site, a passionate staff. So why haven’t you changed the world yet? Maybe your key audiences don’t care—or don’t care enough.

After all, they’re not nursing your particular outrage hangover every morning. They have other problems. Tap into those, and you can make people care. While you’re at it, engage their hearts as well as their minds. Provide food (not medicine) for thought. And give skeptics a reason to believe.

What’s in it for me? Sure, doing the right thing should be its own reward, but it never hurts to sweeten the pot. If you’re promoting legislation, get to know key legislators’ interests, and relate your interests to theirs. Spell out how the issue touches the politician’s voter base—and get the affected voters to help you make your case.

Trying to rouse an apathetic public? Show them how solving this problem will save their kids from harm, improve their job opportunities, or otherwise rock their world. If people know how your issue relates to their lives, you’ll get their attention.

That story made me cry. Move people emotionally, and you’ll move duffs out of chairs and dollars out of wallets. If you can tell real people’s heartbreaking or inspiring stories in an honest way, you can motivate activism.

Best of all: get people to tell their own stories. Amnesty International has motivated a worldwide army of letter writers by bringing them harrowing first-person accounts by prisoners of conscience. Encourage human connections and you’ll get a response.

Reading can be fun! You have to educate people; you don’t have to make it painful. Lively, fat-free backgrounders make it easy for people to learn about your issue—and you’ll keep them engaged long enough to persuade them. Dull, difficult, or insubstantial material pushes away everyone who isn’t already convinced. Why would you want to do that?

That’ll never work. … No, wait, maybe it will. Sometimes people don’t care because they don’t let themselves. Maybe they’ve volunteered or contributed before and seen no results. Maybe they don’t want to get engaged in a struggle with no end in sight. Maybe they’re just cynical.

You need to prove to them that they can make something happen—and that you have made something happen. Talk up your successes everywhere, all the time. In this context, bragging is good. Don’t be afraid to tout small victories—they show people how each step takes you closer to the goal. Profile volunteer or activist achievements. And demonstrate that you have a viable plan—share your strategy (in everyday language) and provide evidence that it will work.

People won’t care because you tell them to; they’ll care because you touch them where they live—and because you leave them no excuse not to.

First published in Words That Work, February 2006.

If you’ve ever had to revise a website to incorporate new information from staff members who had no role in developing it, been forced to squeeze the CEO’s latest brainstorm into a newsletter story at the last minute, or gritted your teeth while an executive rewrote copy for no apparent reason, you’re not alone.

You’ve suffered an affliction experienced by communicators everywhere: we call it “death by committee writing.” It’s a condition guaranteed to make producing publications an arduous, conflict-ridden process that drives you crazy. It also tends to result in communications that are unfocused, dull to read, and scattershot in their messaging—and thus fail to engage the target audience, effectively sabotaging your communications strategy.

Committee = Chaos
 Committee writing is an inherently anti-strategy, pro-chaos process. It reduces effectiveness and blots out creativity because copy gets pulled this way and that until it sometimes doesn’t even resemble what you had in mind when you started out. Writing quality suffers, key points grow fuzzy, messages are lost—and no one wins, least of all the poor reader.

Committee writing also wastes time and duplicates effort. And because the most active (or meddlesome) staff members get their way more often, you wind up with an unbalanced—even inaccurate—representation of your organization.

Prevention Is Key
 You can avoid death by committee writing, however—and you don’t have to run a project as a dictatorship to do it. Quite the contrary: one of the best ways to prevent the problem is to encourage key people to get involved early in the process—before you set a course. Work with them to establish a foundation: why you’re writing the piece, how it supports your communications strategy, what messages it will deliver, and what you want it to achieve. Develop a clear process that defines everyone’s role, sets expectations, and provides firm deadlines.

As you get further along, limit participation. Note everybody needs to see a piece before it’s published—keep in mind that those you show it to will assume license to make changes. One person should have final say over copy revisions (ideally, the person who directs communications, not necessarily the person with the highest rank).

Reviewers Need Guidelines
 Death by committee writing often occurs at the copy review stage when reviewers are content experts who don’t know the goals of the piece because they weren’t involved at the outset or have forgotten early discussions. Avoid this breakdown by giving reviewers guidelines that summarize goals and messaging and specify what they should comment on. (Yes, some will ignore the guidelines, which is why it’s so important for one person to have final authority.)

Take these preventive actions against death by committee writing, and your reviewers are likely to help your strategy, not hinder it. And you’ll have clear, cogent copy that people will actually read. From Words That Work, April 2008.