Mining foreman R. Thornburg shows a small cage with a canary used for testing carbon monoxide gas in 1928. George McCaa, U.S. Bureau of Mines via Smithsonian
Between 1911 and 1986, coalminers used canaries to detect toxic carbon monoxide. Canaries are more sensitive than people to the gas. They die faster than we do. So, we can get out of the mine. Poor birds. Meanwhile like most people I prefer to use canaries in coalmines as metaphors. In this case, they’re the predictor for the presence of toxic gas in your communications. They are your newsletters, and they are indicative. The good news? You can check the smooth running of your entire organization’s communications this way. Look at the canary. Look at your newsletter. Is it looking fresh? Or a bit peaky? So go your organization’s communications more broadly.
A dozen questions to ask yourself as you’re examining the feathers:
1. Do you send it at the same time each week? I don’t mean on the same day. I mean at the same time on the same day. If you don’t, why not? Is it difficult to get sign-off from the people you need to work with to get it done? Are you required to go around too many houses to ensure they’re happy? Do you have content calendared in advance to make it easier to shepherd? These aren’t just challenges that would affect your newsletter. You see what I’m thinking.
2. Do people trust your organization’s take on things? How many people are opening it up? How many people are clicking through? How many people are sharing your content? If the rates are falling over time, why are you losing people? If people don’t trust your newsletter, the chances are your broader reputation needs some work. Canary. Coalmine. Let me know when I’m hammering too hard on this. Oh. Now? Okay. Noted.
3. Are you easy to work with? When people sign up for your newsletter, how many questions are you asking them? Lose points for each extra field of enquiry, for example, “what color is your hair?” Are you sending people a “welcome wagon” email series to say hello and talk to them about your offerings? Is it easy to subscribe to your newsletter if somebody is reading it from a forward? Is there an obvious button on your website to subscribe? Are you using pop-up forms, too, to gather more interest? If your newsletter is difficult to sign up for, then the chances are that your whole organization can be a little tricky for your audience to get hold of. That has implications.
4. Do you build real relationships with your audiences? Are you asking your readers what brings them to you? Are you surveying them to find out what’s engaged them in the first place? What might they want to see next? What turns them off? When they reply to those surveys, are you saying, “thank you?” Or are the replies getting posted into a black hole? It’s a bit like those Michelin restaurant reviewers who can pre-judge a restaurant by the way they’re treated by the maître d’. And you want your maître d’ to be a pleasing canary. This feels like it’s becoming a Monty Python sketch. But.
5. Is your organization often starting new newsletters? If so, what’s wrong with the one you started with? Is there an agreed-upon process to go through to do such a thing, or are they sprawling off in different directions? If the communications team says “no” to starting a newsletter, do people go ahead and create one in Microsoft Outlook? Do they hoist a pirate flag in the background on their Zoom calls and start calling you “landlubber” on Slack? Is there a way to have a constructive conversation about everybody working together? In an ideal world people will fill out a strategic positioning brief. Comms will have a conversation with them. There’ll be a partnership. Not a battle. But I’m a realist. Do people like your communications staff or are they often complaining about them? Likewise, are your communications people in love with the policy folks? Spot the tensions. Kill the canaries. Hoist the mainsail. Yarrr.
6. Are you under-communicating? Once a month is too few times. Once a week is best. Twice a week could even be reasonable and I am definitely still talking about your newsletter.
7. Do you value your reader’s time? Is the most important content prioritized at the top of your newsletter? Can people find what they’re looking for fast? Speaking of which, let’s kill some darlings in the next few points. Darling canary pirates.
8. Is your newsletter promotional? Or is it advocacy? Or is it both? Is there disagreement about that? How can you solve it?
9. Is it intriguing?
10. Is it exclusive? Funny? Does it feel like it was written by a person or a robot? That’s three questions in one, I realize.
11. Are any cool people reading it? Why? What do they say about it? Can you quote them? Where?
12. Does it even exist? Obvious point this, but an out-of-breath canary is better than no canary. Or a canary overstuffed with metaphoric implications. A pirate canary. Or a darling canary. And I don’t like to let a perfect canary be the enemy of a good canary. I do often say that if you don’t say anything, people will assume you have nothing to say. Likewise, most of us prefer canaries to no canaries. Last of all the good thing about canaries as metaphors is you can resurrect them. Even if that really gets confusing. Especially around Easter.
I hope that by asking these questions of your newsletter you might also start to look deeper. Then you might be able to think about ways the organization can flex a bit. The goal is to see all tactical communication activity as a forcing function for healthy organizational culture. It’s chicken and egg. Canary and egg. You get the picture. Or perhaps you don’t.
In which case? Let’s have a chat. I’m far more coherent in person albeit just as much of a show-off. None of this is rocket science but it does pay huge dividends (and not only in the fun stakes) to get these questions answered.
