Three Ways to Get Your Message Out
How many of us get too much email? Everyone, right? IT folks send out regular updates, the sales team announces new, important clients, HR reveals the latest hires and changes to benefits—and then there’s all the email you have with clients and coworkers related just to your current work. And that doesn’t even include the spam you have to clean out despite your spam-protection tools.
There’s too much information to consume, so what can firm employees do to help one another?
Here are three critical components:
- Say the most important things first
- Use bullets and highlighting
- Publish the details elsewhere
The key is to focus on what’s most important when composing your messages. Use the method journalists implement when writing news copy: the “inverse pyramid.” Focus on important information first, then give progressively more details as you write.
I also find it useful to bullet my emails and carefully use bold to highlight really important sentences or phrases. If everyone did this when writing an email, it would save everyone else that much more time reading each message.
A couple months ago, David Sheives, COO of Gainer, Donnelly & Desroches, commented that his firm’s IT folks use email for critical announcements and have an internal IT blog for other announcements.
This is a great idea, and one that doesn’t need to be limited to a firm’s IT team. Critical announcements from any group should be sent by email, but the rest might be published on an internal website using blogging software.
This is especially convenient when using Microsoft Outlook 2007, since blogs can be read within that software easily. Anyone wanting to know how a committee is progressing toward its goals can check the blog at any time. When a committee finally makes the important decision about where to hold the next annual planning session, that presents an occasion to send out an email.
The key to good communication using modern communication tools is to present the important facts first and spread out the rest—either within an alternate publishing medium or following the main points in a message.
