If you’ve been in business long enough, you know that there are occasions that call for many different types of communication. You can’t give the same presentation to your investors as you would to your employees, and your potential leads don’t always respond to the same types of messages as your current clients and customers.
But if something exciting happens (like an award presentation, an endorsement, or a special promotion), you want to ensure that everyone gets the news. What’s the best way to cover all of your bases?
Here at Piktochart, we ran into the same conundrum. We were recently certified by WorldBlu as a Freedom-Centered Workplace, and we wanted to shout it from the digital rooftops!
But as we were looking through the press releases and potential tweets, we found an opportunity to delve into a deeper discussion about the best ways to tell people about this honor without it coming off as braggadocio.
We learned that there are members of our Piktochart family that thought that we would be disregarding our company value of humility by making a big announcement. We had an open discussion about the why and how of making this news known to everyone, our own team members included.
We decided that listing the WorldBlu certification on our website and announcing it on our blog was one way to let potential hires learn that Piktochart embraces freedom and autonomy on a level that is recognized globally.
We’re thrilled to be listed alongside brands like New Belgium Brewing, Dreamhost, and Zappos for our freedom-centric views on work and employee interaction.
The intellectual side of the discussion eventually gave way to the more practical side: how would we get this news to as many people as necessary without alienating anyone or losing their attention in the process?
Working as a team, we brainstormed some best practices to follow when trying to deliver a message in different ways. We also came up with some examples for others to use as blueprints for your own announcements and presentations. We hope that you find this post helpful when it comes to delivering the same news to different audiences.
[clickToTweet tweet=”If you can’t write it on a sticky note, it probably shouldn’t be jammed into a tweet.” quote=”‘If you can’t write it on a sticky note, it probably shouldn’t be jammed into a tweet.'”]
In addition to showing you how we went about delivering this great news, we’ll also be sprinkling some additional information about the WorldBlu award throughout the post. If you have questions about WorldBlu Freedom-Centered Workplace certification, feel free to email me, and I’ll make sure you get the answers you need!
Best Practices
We put together a short list of design principles that we think you should follow when you’re composing and critiquing your messages. Some of these tips have a more in-depth post associated with them, so if your interest is piqued, we encourage you to keep clicking and learning!
Keep continuity and cohesion
First, make sure that your style and design choices remain consistent across your message channels. Keeping a level of continuity in your messaging makes it easier to recognize, and that helps keep it associated with your brand or company.
For instance, if you’ve picked a particular color palette for your presentation, keep it for your infographic and social media visual as well. The same goes for font choices. As always, we recommend limiting yourself to two fonts and four font variations.
The information should be the focal point of your messages, not the fonts, colors, icons, and charts. You want to complement your data, not overshadow it.
[irp posts=”14863″ name=”The 3 Worst Infographic Design Mistakes (and How to Fix Them!)”]
Work from most to least (or vice versa)
One of the possible pitfalls that comes with repurposing content in different ways is jamming too much information into a smaller-than-necessary space.
To prevent this, try working from one end of the spectrum to the other. Start with the most important information in your social media visual and expand as your grow. Or start with everything in a presentation and whittle it down to the bare essentials for the visual.
When I was a teacher, one of the lessons I used to teach summarizing was called Poster, Page, Post-It™. My students had to express their ideas in all three formats while ensuring that nothing important was missed or lost in the shuffle.
Try looking at your messages this way. If you can’t write it on a sticky note, it probably shouldn’t be jammed into a tweet.
Each piece has a specific purpose
Likewise, every message you construct has a specific purpose. If you’re drafting a presentation for your board members and investors, you can likely tailor the blog infographic for a different subset of people. The same goes for the social media visual.
Think about your audience. Where are they viewing your content? How much time do they have? What’s their attention span like? Settling in for an involved presentation at an all-hands meeting is different from a quick Twitter check while you wait in line at the bank.
Don’t try to do too much with every piece of content your create. Stay focused on the message’s specific audience and purpose, and you’re bound to be more successful.
How It Works
As I said earlier, every message has an audience and a purpose. There are goals to accomplish with each piece. We thought it might be useful to show an example of some of the messages we used to deliver the news of our recent award.
Note: all of these formats were created using the Education Agenda template, a pro level template in our collection.
Presentation
First, we made a presentation to show at our weekly all-hands meeting (which we call the MMM, or Monday Morning Meeting). Our goals were to A) let everyone at Piktochart know that we’d been named to the list of freedom-centered workplaces and B) tell them a bit more about the significance of the award.
For this message, we included all of the important information we could find. We talked about the history of the award, the process for scoring, the necessary qualifications, and how we scored overall. We also included a list of some of the other winners and some snippets about our area of excellence, Reflection + Evaluation.
Infographic
For the infographic, we had to trim out some of the non-essential information. Instead, we relied on more charts, graphs, and icons to showcase the same information. By trading out text for visuals, we made the infographic more appropriate for a blog post-style announcement because it was short enough to keep the audience’s attention, but not so complex as to alienate or lose them.
For this message, we kept the essential information: what the award is, why we received it, and what the general process was like. We didn’t want to include too much information about WorldBlu as a company or many of the other awardees.
This message was directed towards our blog readers or people who might be interested in learning more about Piktochart, so we focused on celebrating our accomplishment (while keeping it in perspective).
Social Visual
The final piece was our social media visual. In many ways, it was the hardest message to compose because we didn’t want to leave out any essential information. Inline images in Twitter’s feed are only allowed to be certain dimensions, and we didn’t want to have any awkward cropping or clipping problems.
For this visual, we kept it to the bare minimum. We included the award image, both our logo and WorldBlu’s logo, and a short message with a hashtag explaining the significance of the image and the award.
What challenges have you come across when trying to deliver news to multiple audiences? We’d love to hear about how you accomplished your goals down in the comments?
