Attested Media

Yesterday, my colleague drove me through an estate with a population of the target audience of our organization’s stakeholders. Pointing at an elderly person on the street, he told me, “When you begin telling that person about water shortage in Samburu, that person will have endless questions. They may not visualize how Samburu looks like. They may not literally have a mental picture of that problem. So, what we try doing is simplifying that problem to fit.”

I also asked him why we still have to print appeals when almost everyone is going digital, and he pointed to a mailbox outside a residential home and said, ‘It is simple and straightforward. The system here is such that they will pick those printouts and actually read them.’

I have never appreciated audience segmentation the way I did after that experience. As we drove back, we thought about what it means to communicate the same issues through the same channels to a different segmentation. What I have always known is the concept of identifying the audience and communicating to them through the right channels at the right timing. That is all about strategic communication.

But I started realizing it is not as simple a matrix as I have thought since I started off the journey of understanding corporate communications and public relations. The matrix is broader. I do not have the answers yet, but I am challenged to think through how to figure out strategic communication in what I think is “heterogeneity of a homogeneous group.” I will explain why I have coined that phrase as I solve the puzzle.

Meanwhile, I think communicators can still solve the tension by clearly identifying the problem they are trying to solve, leveraging from data insights, and then simplifying complex issues in nicely data storytelling methods.

I hope I will not come out dismissing already existing buzzwords like Brent Dykes’ “Effective Data Storytelling and why being a data visualization expert is pointless” on discovering how poorly understood the concept of data storytelling was and how the term was in danger of becoming just another empty buzzword. Despite its immense potential, it was frequently positioned as just an extension of data visualization.