More is More: A Tale of a Communications Audit
I tell my team “more is more” all the time. More ideas, more options, more ways to articulate the same thing. It’s served us well as a mantra for creative work. But as much as I love the “more is more” mantra, I am acutely aware of how that can backfire. Take communications as an example (and as the basis of the blog post you are about to read). More channels, more emails, more announcements competing for the same five minutes of somebody’s attention isn’t abundance, it’s noise. It’s exhausting, it’s counterproductive and it’s the dark side of “more is more.”
Organizations of all sizes run into this all the time. You know the words to this song: All the time and resources are put into communicating outward, to customers, to donors, to the community on channel after channel to reach all the people. The record scratches when all the communications tasks are complete and yet, despite the engagement rates, nobody knows what’s what.
So, how does a communications department get the information to the people?
That’s exactly the question we got to sit with recently, working alongside the team at Pierce County Library System (PCLS) on a full communications assessment. And what we found wasn’t a broken system. It was a human one, full of good people doing good work, tripping over gaps that nobody had drawn a map for yet.
People Don’t Want More Information. They Want the Right Information, at the Right Time, From Someone They Trust.
Our research and strategy teams hosted workshops with PCLS staff during which we asked them to write down their frustrations on sticky notes. We wanted honesty over polish, candor over sugar-coating. The story that took shape was a familiar one: busy teams overwhelmed and confused by a range of things. None of the issues were about a lack of effort or intent. It was a lack of a system.
When communications are reactive, built to survive the next urgent announcement instead of supporting a real strategy, it becomes noise. People drown in noise and stop listening for the signal. The solution is disarmingly simple:
Clarity.
Timeliness.
A reason why.
A way to talk back, not just be talked at.
Predictable channels instead of a guessing game about where to find the memo that mattered.
Trust Is Built in the Boring Moments
Here’s the thing about internal comms that nobody puts on a poster: trust isn’t built during the big splashy campaign. It’s built in the boring, consistent, unglamorous middle. The monthly update that actually comes monthly, the SharePoint page that’s actually current, the newsletter people open because it’s never wasted their time before.
That steadiness is what turns a communications team from a group that reacts into a group that leads.
Structure Sets People Free
I know structure sounds like the opposite of creative freedom (because it is), but stick with me. When nobody owns a channel, everybody’s guessing. When there’s no map for what goes where. Is this a Teams message, a SharePoint post, an email, a newsletter blurb or all four? Under these circumstances, people either overcommunicate out of anxiety or stay silent out of confusion. Neither one builds trust.
Giving a communications team the staffing, the governance and the channel clarity to do their job isn’t bureaucracy for its own sake. It’s what sets your messages up to land.
Let’s review that one more time.
Giving a communications team the staffing, the governance and the channel clarity to do their job isn’t bureaucracy for its own sake. It’s what sets your messages up to land.
The Real Work Starts With Listening
If there’s one thing this project reaffirmed for me, and I’ve been doing this work in one form or another since my newsroom days, it’s that you cannot strategize your way past skipping the listening part. The affinity workshops, the surveys, the plain old “tell me what’s frustrating you” conversations: that’s not the warm-up to the real work. That is the real work. Everything downstream — the SharePoint redesign, the refreshed newsletter, the leadership video updates, the feedback loops — only works because it’s answering something real that people said.
So if your organization’s internal comms feel more like static than signal, don’t start by adding another channel. Start with a room full of sticky notes and some hard questions. Find out what’s not there. Then go build it, deliberately, with less noise, not more.
Because sometimes the most helpful thing a communications team can do isn’t adding. It’s editing.
Want help figuring out where your organization’s more-is-more instinct might actually be working against you? That’s the kind of assessment we love to run. Let’s talk.
