8-Successfully Communicating with Key Messages

Andrea Graff

Successfully Communicating with Key Messages

Reference: Summerfield, S., Benninghoven, S. (2006). Successfully communicating with key messages. Western City.

Theme: Creating a key message culture in your city will provide benefits for your organization.

Summary:

• A key message is the thing you want your audience to go away with when they are done listening to your speech or reading your website. Being able to "stay on message" requires discipline and is very different from the multi page documents some may be used to putting out.

• Creating a key message requires you to step back and thing about what you really want your audience to know. You are going to have multiple audiences that you are going to be addressing and you need to arrange your message in different ways to address the different audiences.

• You are going to need to deliver the messages to your audiences in different ways. Make sure you consider the different approaches and which one will fit best with the audience you are addressing.

• If you are met with resistance when implementing key messages showing successful case studies may be helpful. The city council and city manager must be on board for others to accept and implement the new way of doing things.

Application to the lesson topic:
Understanding what a key message is, how to create it, and who it will be delivered to is the first step of implementing them into your agency.

Application to emergency services:
If key messages aren't the current format being used, converting our agencies over will benefit not only us, but the city as well. Getting the most pertinent information to the public should be our main goal.