Democratic Senators pick communications strategy to get their message across
Today's Boston Globe has an interesting article today about how Senate Democrats have adopted a new centralized communications strategy to promote their agenda. Of particular interest in this story was this section:
Said another way, these senators just adopted three essential tactics for powerful communication:
No matter what your political views, I expect we'll be paying a lot more attention to what Senate Democrats say in coming months, simply because of this new communication strategy. Stay tuned.
By the way, Blackfriars has looked at how politicians communicate before, and it hasn't aways been wonderful. We had a chance to revisit our 2003 analysis of presidential candidate web sites recently. In that analysis, we were surprised to discover that only three out of 10 of the candidates communicated clearly enough to rate a "Pass" by Blackfriars. But we were surprised to discover that our ratings of Bush's and Kerry's communication clarity actually matched up with the outcome of the general election (i.e., that Bush more clearly communicated to voters, volunteers, donors, and press better than Kerry did). We'll grant that it may be just coincidence, but we also believe that clear communication pays even bigger dividends in politics than it does in business.
For the first time, the 44 Democratic senators
are coordinating their media messages through
a centralized Senate Democratic Communications
Center. The new center has its "war room" in
an office on the Capitol's third floor, where
staff members send out daily talking points
to Democratic press secretaries, line up
radio and television interviews with senators,
and issue "rapid-response" news releases
in the style of political campaigns.
The center has an aide dedicated to getting
information to Democratic-leaning bloggers
and yesterday launched a website,
democrats.gov, to better communicate the
positions of Senate Democrats.
Said another way, these senators just adopted three essential tactics for powerful communication:
- Boil what you want to say down into a straightforward story,
- Tell the story consistently with the same words, and
- Give people an easy way to get the story.
No matter what your political views, I expect we'll be paying a lot more attention to what Senate Democrats say in coming months, simply because of this new communication strategy. Stay tuned.
By the way, Blackfriars has looked at how politicians communicate before, and it hasn't aways been wonderful. We had a chance to revisit our 2003 analysis of presidential candidate web sites recently. In that analysis, we were surprised to discover that only three out of 10 of the candidates communicated clearly enough to rate a "Pass" by Blackfriars. But we were surprised to discover that our ratings of Bush's and Kerry's communication clarity actually matched up with the outcome of the general election (i.e., that Bush more clearly communicated to voters, volunteers, donors, and press better than Kerry did). We'll grant that it may be just coincidence, but we also believe that clear communication pays even bigger dividends in politics than it does in business.
posted by Carl Howe at
11:15 AM
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