This guide has been adapted from Alex M H Smith’s article, to speak direct to impact comms professionals
Communication ties everything together. Aligning your team, connecting you with your audience, and structures your thinking. Getting it right gives you the capacity to transform your workflows and your relationship to the people you’re trying to reach.
This particularly matters in impact comms, where your words often need to work across very different audiences at the same time. A policy lead and a first-time supporter don't read the same way, and they shouldn't have to receive the same thing. Knowing who you're talking to, and being honest about when that shifts, is where a lot of strategic voice work really begins.
Avoid a communication style that’s full of jargon, value judgements, and a professional tone that makes everything sound too formal.
Powerful communication is: clear, specific, exciting, and content-rich.
Don't tell me you're "disruptive". Tell me precisely what you're doing, and I'll respond by saying "wow, that's disruptive."
Remove every value judgement from your writing. That means: good, best, better, leading, revolutionary, industry-leading and anything like them.
These words are responses to information, not information itself. When you use them, you're trying to shortcut the hard work of actually saying something. Nobody falls for it.
In impact comms this is especially easy to get wrong. The work is meaningful, so the temptation is to say it's meaningful, rather than just showing why. Let the outcomes speak.
| Instead of... | Say... |
|---|---|
| Strategy | The value we're giving people they can't get elsewhere |
| Positioning | The stuff we're comparing ourselves to |
| Vision | The thing we want to happen |
Technical terms have loose meanings that vary from person to person. When you use them, everyone hears something different. And in impact comms, where you're often bridging policy language and public language in the same breath, that ambiguity compounds fast.
Jargon is also often a shield, a way of getting people nodding along when nothing of value is being said. Say what you mean. Always.
Clarity and simplicity are not the same thing. Often they're the opposite.