Exposing the Truth vs. Moving the Needle: Who Communications Is Really For

There is a question I come back to when deciding what to communicate:

Who is this actually for?

Not who approved it. Not who is arguing about it internally. Not who already follows every meeting, thread, memo, and rumor. Who needs to understand this but isn't already in the conversation?

The people closest to an issue usually know the names, chronology, factions, and subtext. They have also often decided what they believe.

They are rarely the audience that needs the most help.

The harder audience to reach is what I think of as the everyday majority: people who care about what is happening but are also working, raising children, managing money, caregiving, commuting, their health, and doing everything else that makes up a life.

They may know something is happening. They may have caught a headline, heard something from a neighbor, or seen part of a Facebook argument.

What they usually do not have is three hours to reconstruct the issue from meeting videos, PDFs, screenshots, and competing versions of events.

That is where communications has to do some actual work.

Too often, transparency is treated as disclosure alone. Put the documents online. Release the email. Publish the report. Upload the meeting packet.

Access matters, but access and understanding are not the same thing.

A 200-page PDF may technically contain the answer while doing very little to help someone find it. A meeting video can be public while requiring a resident to know exactly which two minutes matter. A document dump can reveal plenty and still leave people unsure what happened or what they are supposed to do next.

Transparency is useful when it makes participation possible.

Can someone outside the institution understand enough to decide what they think? Can they tell whether they need to show up, vote, respond, object, apply, attend, or simply understand why something happened?

If not, the organization may have disclosed information without successfully communicating it.

My work in Cleveland Heights made that distinction very clear to me.

The problem was rarely that information did not exist. Usually, a lot of information existed. It was spread across agendas, department pages, meeting materials, staff knowledge, public notices, email, social posts, press coverage, and years of institutional context.

Residents were expected to assemble the picture themselves.

The work was to make the city more legible: explain decisions in plain language, provide context before people had to go searching for it, and think about what someone outside City Hall needed to understand the stakes.

It also meant resisting the assumption that the loudest people in the room represented the entire audience.

They usually did not. But, unchecked, they become the most convincing.

Organizations can distort their own communications by writing primarily for the people most likely to argue back. The tone becomes defensive. The language becomes technical. Every sentence starts sounding as though it was written for cross-examination.

The insiders can still follow along.

Everyone else leaves because the conversation starts to feel like drama, and most people do not have the time or energy to work through it.

Good communications should lower the amount of prior knowledge required to participate.

That principle also explains why I care about editorial design. A magazine, report, guide, newsletter, or well-built publication can take information that exists in fragments and give it sequence and context.

The value is not simply that it looks better.

It gives you room to explain.

A piece can be beautifully designed and still fail the person encountering it cold. A clever headline can make perfect sense to the five people who wrote it and almost none to the resident seeing it for the first time.

I am much more interested in whether the work functions outside the room where it was made.

Can a distracted person understand it? Can someone who missed the previous three updates enter the conversation here? Can someone who disagrees with the organization still understand what the organization is saying?

Communications should give people enough clarity to decide for themselves.

That is the difference between exposing information and moving the needle.

If that is the communications problem you are trying to solve, start a conversation here.