If your goal is awareness, stop thinking in channels

Often in public sector communications, we ask questions like:

• What do we need to communicate?

• What can we post about X to drum up some interest for it?

• How can we use our TikTok to promote X?

• How do we use social media to make residents aware of X?

All reasonable questions, but I also think they limit how we think about success.

For awareness-style campaigns, the goal is often attention at scale. And that means taking a step back from specific posts and specific channels, and thinking instead about how we do stuff that ends up on people's phones.

It might get there through our own channels, but it could also be shared, screenshotted, or linked to by other people.

Or it could be something people encounter in the real world, photograph or film themselves, and put on their own channels.

We shouldn't be particularly picky about how we end up on those little screens - or via which app. The important thing is that we get there.

Of course, the bar for creating something people actually want to share, photograph or talk about is high.

But starting with ‘how do we get this onto people's phones?’ rather than ‘what can we post?’ might at least lead us somewhere more interesting.

And give our campaigns a better chance of actually working.