One Message, Many Approaches

A little more than a year ago, I met with a communications expert, and several training experts to discuss our combined efforts for rolling out a company-wide application and business process for 30,000 across the United States.

We faced major hurdles: we couldn't communicate directly with most of our users and we couldn't require them to take training. We could, however, create training and make it available and we could contact them through their groups' internal newsletters.

We spent the first meeting covering one simple point: every single word we spoke, recorded, wrote, or disseminated had to speak to our main points or we didn't say it. It took us two weeks to assemble our talking points before we even started to design our various products.

Then, we went off and created a plethora of multi-media delights, from newsletters, to table placards, to online live and recorded demos, to content-rich on-line training, to townhall meetings, to a comprehensive FAQ and help file. The effort included marketing, change management, training, user acceptance training, and support. And through the entire process, when determining if we were on course, we went back to the talking points.

Our roll-out was as smooth as it could be, considering its constraints. But the process was enlightening. Our approach went beyond single sourcing. It combined our marketing, technical documentation, training, and change management approaches to assure that every aspect of the message was in sync across all components.

I've written technical documentation for nearly twenty years now, and never have I worked in a circumstance that allowed this convergence. Tech docs is content in their silo, adjacent to the developers--but not too close. Marketing sits someplace else. Training might talk with marketing, or might not. But an alliance between marketing, tech docs, and training is rare.

And that's too bad. If all user-facing activities, from marketing to end-user support, follow the same well-conceived and focused message, a user-focused approach is easier to develop and maintain. In a world where getting more with less is the rule, this approach is an easy, inexpensive way to serve customers and build loyalty.