Intranet Advent Day 19 – Write for your audience, not for your boss

We’re counting down to Christmas with a stocking-filler tip every day.

You’re making a list, you’re checking it twice, then it get’s trapped in endless review cycles by your stakeholders. Recognise this? Every stakeholder agrees what has to be said, but each wants you to ‘soften this’ and ‘reword that’…

As an experienced communicator, or writer, you may well fume ‘I wouldn’t tell them how to do their job’. Take a breath and accept that stakeholders might struggle to express what they need to say and your experience won’t be obvious to them.

The first step in presenting your first draft to stakeholders could include briefly explaining your thinking. Explain why you’ve put the topics in such an order. Show your focus on telling a story, starting with ‘what’ is happening, and ‘who’ is involved, followed by greater detail and context. As stakeholders will have preferences about style, tone, and voice, you may want to justify your vocabulary.

The second step is to challenge feedback with clarification questions. It’s not that you disagree with stakeholders’ instructions; it’s just that you want to understand why they want what they want. Stakeholders may not have explained their needs (and may not be able to articulate their ‘gut reactions’), and of course they probably have further knowledge about the topic that they cannot share with you.

Standards – style guide

When explaining your vocabulary and tone choices, it helps to reference a style guide. If communication is a strategic matter for your company, you’ll no doubt have a house style guide available on your intranet. If you’re still building the importance of comms, you might reference the AP Stylebook, the Guardian style guide, or perhaps Plain English.

Frankly, you’ll need a little house guide of some kind, if only to specify whether you use sentence case or title case in headings!

Our ‘creating intranet content’ guide (below) could form the basis of your house style guide, and will certainly help your intranet contributors better communicate.

So, once you’re prepared to understand your stakeholders’ real needs and explain your vocab and layout choices, you can focus on empathising with your audience and crafting communications that inspire behaviour change.

Siding with the audience means you can, at times, push back stakeholder comments. I’ve had managers ominously pause over my work and then say ‘I trust your judgement on this’ and that is very validating. Your communication work is an expression of your experience; nobody has all the experience to be perfect, but if you know your audience from within (rather than from above) you manager should trust you to do what’s best.

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Write for your audience, not your boss: http://t.co/SiVewPpNot #IC #internalcomms #intranetadvent

— ClearBox Consulting (@ClearBoxTeam) December 19, 2014

Check #intranetadvent for a fresh idea each day.