Communication Checklist
I am involved with several organizations across my professional and personal life. While they have mostly been reasonable to work with, I have encountered a handful of organizations that I wish had better communication skills. Ideally, every message coming from an organization is crafted in a way that the meaning they intend is transmitted with no revisions to the recipient(s). While perfect transmission of meaning between two parties with different life experiences is close to impossible I believe there are steps we can take to get close to that goal.
Airplane pilots have an important job to keep their passengers safe. To ensure that they are adhering to all of the safety protocols that have been established they use checklists. A consistent checklist may seem tedious for a job that is performed every day but it is an effective tool to verify that what should be done is done.
Perhaps those who are responsible for managing communication between an organization and its customers/members/employees could adopt the practice of running through a checklist like a pilot. Here is the checklist I would work through before sending any communication:
Read the message out loud at least once. Review the rest of this list to get a sense of the potential edits that should be made and read it aloud again. Hearing the message involves a different neural pathway from just reading it in your head, which will help you evaluate the message against the rest of this list.
Check for spelling and grammatical errors. No need to embarrass yourself with a silly mistake.
Use the right medium. The medium is the message. While the content is important, the way it is delivered factors into how the communication will be understood. For example, it feels different when a romantic partner breaks up with you in person versus over a text message or email.
Make sure your recipient knows how to respond or reach you if they have questions.
Highlight calls to action. If your message should initiate a response from the recipient make sure that what they are expected to do is highlighted. Put a TLDR (too long, didn’t read) list with the key calls to action at the top of the message. Make sure the list is not too long, three or four calls to action are probably the most any one message should have.
If it could be helpful, include diagrams that illustrate what you are trying to say. Does the message reference physical locations? An annotated map or photos of the spaces you are talking about could help the recipient identify the places referred to in the message. Maybe you are explaining a complicated process and a flow chart could be an effective summary.
Pretend you are the recipient. Does the message make sense within the context of what the recipient knows? We all live and work in domains with a particular vocabulary that may not make sense or convey the same meaning to someone outside of that domain. Try to identify any words or phrases that make sense to you but might be interpreted differently and make an effort to adopt vocabulary and phrases that are familiar to your recipient.
Review the last message you sent to the recipient. How long has it been since you have communicated with them? Where did the conversation leave off? Should you address a lingering issue?
Think about recent or upcoming events that may impact how your message could be received. Writing to a student in early May? They are excited for summer break. Does that anticipation alter the meaning you are trying to convey?
Running through this checklist before sending out any message from your organization can prevent a lot of potential miscommunication and reduce clarifying questions which will save you time and increase trust between your organization and its audience.