I have been attending the NERCOMP Board retreat at Water’s Edge in Westbrook, CT. Since it is close to home, I have chosen to come home and attend all the meetings and hanging outs. The weather was not that great early on, but has been gorgeous since thursday afternoon. One of the major themes at the retreat is, yes, you guessed it right – how to improve communications. This is exactly what we have been talking about at Wellesley. In fact, we are going to discuss this amongst ourselves in LTS and chart a plan for the upcoming year. Though we have done an excellent job by centralizing all communications, bringing a simple and common vocabulary, there are many in the community who complain that they don’t hear about many of the things we communicate.

To me, this is a major unsolved problem. Whereas many unsolved problems in the sciences have been documented,   such as the famous protein folding or “Do any odd weird numbers exist?” (hmmm.. i thought all weird numbers are kind of odd),  communications is not listed as an unsolved problem. In my mind, it is a huge unsolved problem. There are plenty of free advice on fixing communication problems involving relationships. And this interesting advice from the office of HR in University of Minnesota on “Communicating to Solve Problems“.  Obviously these are generalizations and don’t necessarily work across the board. What I am interested in the narrow slice – how do effective organizations communicate with their audience. In other words, what should we do to communicate effectively with our faculty, staff, students and alumnae. Or, what should NERCOMP do about effective communications with its members?

As always, what is the problem? In our case, essential things that we communicate – systems changes, library matters, SPAMs, etc. etc. – are not getting through. How do we know? Because we hear from our user community. For eg. users trying to access systems when they are down for maintenance complain that they didn’t hear that it was going to be down and they had scheduled to do critical work at that time, or that they spent one hour to come to the library only to see that it is closed, or “well, I sent the password because the email looked like it came from you”. Anyone denying that we have communications issues is simply lying or living in a fantasy world.

Obviously we want to try to solve this… Oops, no, not solve this, but try to improve our communication. This is where some reality check will come in handy.

Communication in this context is a contract. We have an obligation to let our users know about everything we do that will affect them and they are agreeing to consume the information and use them appropriately. This is a loaded statement. First off, the two parties have to agree to a lot of things – what constitutes a worthwhile communication? what is the right amount of information? what is the best mode of communication? etc. And each of this then depends on the user. Even if we generalize based on the usual constituent groups, not all faculty or students will agree with same answers.

On the other hand, we need to be realistic in what we can do and how much resources we are willing to allocate for this. This is where some generalizations will help and also setting expectations is important. For eg. we can say that we will use the service alert blog for ALL of our communications, and provide specific instructions on how they can customize the delivery of information that suits them the best – email subscription for some, rss feed to others etc. In addition, we can facilitate further categorizations through the use of agreed upon tags. Tags such as #Google, #Sakai, #Banner can be used to categorize the communication which will then allow the users to select which categories of communication they are interested in receiving.

But, how exactly do we communicate all of these, when communication is the core of the problem? What is the common communication platform through which we tell the users that this is what is going to happen and do it in a way that it will catch their attention? We need to find some of the key technologies that the different users use. We can no longer assume that everyone uses MyWellesley all the time, or even email through our single sign on page.

This is where two key components to this puzzle will help – setting expectations and metrics. No matter how hard we try, our communications are not going to reach everyone all the time. So, what should we aspire for? Cascading has been suggested and we use it successfully. Try to find key users in certain areas (such as the functional technology users in administrative departments or administrative assistants in academic departments or Resident Advisers in residence halls) and communicate directly with them and then have them pass the word around. Whereas this works well, it is absolutely critical that we provide them clear information that they understand so they can pass the information around accurately. And we will continue to do this. But, these key players are busy too and sometimes they feel that it is not their job to communicate on our behalf. So, we have to build relationships with these users because they are extremely important conduits of effective communication.

Finally, if we do not have a plan to measure whether the changes we are making is actually making a difference and tweak the plan as needed, everything is a total waste! How do we know then that the plan is working or not?

In this day of ubiquitous connectivity and information overload, finding the right formula to get your audience to pay attention to what affects them will remain a huge challenge, at least until, they believe that we are doing this for their benefit. That takes a lot of time and effort and such a belief will quickly turn into “you are simply burdening me with too much information”.

Oh, what a fun job in a library and technology organization. Wait – where is communication in the name of the organization?