Your organization had an opportunity these last two months that most research-driven organizations didn’t take.
Did yours?
The opportunity, that is, to answer a simple question, posed nicely by Geoffrey Director, the VP of Intelligence at the content marketing firm Manifest:
…What is the content that only your brand can provide that would also be genuinely valuable to your audience?
Here’s a condensed version of what I’m telling all my clients — all researchers who run their own teams and organizations, large and small — right now:
There is only one story for the foreseeable future.
If you can’t be hyper-relevant to it, hold off on almost all your communications for now.…
There are three approaches researchers and their comms support (if they have it) can take to creating thought leadership — three gears, if you will.
As with gears (speaking as a long-time devotee of manual transmissions), you should know which one you’re in, why you’re in it and whether you’re going to stay there or shift up.…
How can you engage exactly the grass-tops people you want talking about your ideas, expertise and new research?
Katy Napotnik of The Urban Institute reveals Urban’s blueprint for doing so in a Medium essay that every CEO, director and comms director at research-driven organizations should marinate in.…
All of the leaders of research-driven groups I’ve worked with over the last five years have two things in common (other than their work being based in research).
Mission statements are like home fragrances. Go ahead and have your communications team create its own, if they need a pick-me-up. Make it short enough, so it fits on the back of your softball league jerseys. But don’t be surprised when, in a year or six months or three, it no longer makes a difference.…