In praise of paper – hard copies (sometimes) rule

I’ve just written a comms plan for a client and found myself writing in a few hard copy documents within the deliverables list. Heresy! Surely everything should be online nowadays? After all, some are saying email is dead so what hope for actual, real, touchable bits of paper?

It was an instinctive thought and it made me reflect on why I put them in there, before the client asked me the same thing. This is what I came up with:

• They are instant – you put them in people’s hands and they’re there.  You don’t have to wait until people have a minute to open an email attachment or navigate through an intranet site to get to it.
• You can write on them – put them in someone’s hands while they are listening to the same subject matter and they can take notes as they follow. When they review their notes they’ll make more sense because the context will be there.
• People can take them away to read – useful if they are travelling back from a venue or are overnight in a hotel and not wanting to go online.
• They can provide more detail and/or explanation – useful to build on information they’ve just heard in a presentation, for example.
• They give immediate consistency at multi-site presentations – ever use multi-site cascaded presentations to tailor key messages to particular audiences? Great, and answers that ‘what-does-it-mean-for-me?’ question. But by definition you lose consistency in the key messages (because the presenters will concentrate on the areas in which they and their audience are most interested). A hard copy of the core information given out at the end of the presentation provides that immediate consistency.
• They’re useful if you want to guide the reader through a lengthier story in a particular order  (to show the logic behind a big decision, for example).  You can put it online but people can get distracted online and start clicking away at other links.
• They are different!  I produced a hard copy booklet once for a client where our stakeholders were just fed up with the amount of information that they were being presented with. This was all do with consultation (so required by law) and there was a lot of stuff going through consultation in a short amount of time.  Everything was online, very few looked at it because there was so much and it was very dry. The booklet allowed us to join it all together, provide a bigger picture and demonstrate the benefits more clearly. Yes, we could have put it online with a big flashing star but the fact it was in front of them and looked interesting made them read most if not all of it.

Of course you don’t want to overdo it – that’s annoying to the audience (therefore self-defeating), can be expensive and is not terribly environmentally friendly.  But on certain occasions, a good old piece of paper is a vital part of an effective mix of channels.

People not channels?

I’ve seen a lot in the last couple of days about channels. Social media is clearly “the in thing”, and quite rightly internal comms folk are looking to make sure that they incorporate this into their thinking and take advantage of the active audience participation that derives from it.

There have also been a few things about PowerPoint recently. Unlike social media, this is now seen to be a bad thing. And quite rightly internal comms folk are advising that this is not always a good tool for presenters to use in support of their message.

But it made me wonder whether this emphasis on the method of delivery is distracting us from concentrating on our audiences/stakeholders. Social media is not for everyone. Lots of people don’t get Twitter or Facebook and we can’t force people to participate. PowerPoint is not always wrong. Bad PowerPoint is, but you can still do good things with it. A good presenter using PowerPoint is going to be better than a bad presenter using Prezi.

Analysing stakeholders and accounting for their different preferences is at the heart of effective communications. Because they like different things we need to use a range of channels to get the message across. Because they have different levels of understanding and different levels of interest we need to tailor messages to get them to land properly. We need to ask them what they heard, what they understood, what they took from our comms so we can keep it going and do it better.

And hardening my nose for a minute, we also know that some stakeholders are more important than others (which is why we do all that analysis, mapping and engagement plan stuff). Would you use social media to hit your most important stakeholders? Maybe not. I have to admit, though, that I have used PowerPoint for this (*ducks, awaits onslaught*).