Consulting Journal: Continuity planning - Building your message maps

Continuity planning: Building your message maps

by David Blakey

How to build message maps to plan the messages that you want to convey to your audiences.

[Monday 5 September 2016]

Once your basic plan is complete, your team can start to work on the actual messages.

This can best be done using a simple form. You can download one here: message map.

Considerations

Before you begin, consider the following:

Keep messages simple. They must be understood by an audience who may not have a university education.
Avoid jargon. Check whether any of the words that you use are jargon or have a different meaning to a general audience.
Use the primacy / recency effect, which states that the most important items should be the first and the last. This applies especially if you are using more than the three key messages that are shown on the form. When people hear several messages, they remember the first and the most recent.
Make sure that referees and other third parties are credible. An endorsement by someone who could not be expected to actually know you will not be as credible as one from someone who clearly does know you.
Use graphics and visual aids. They need not be in the message map, but you should add a reference to them.
Use stories when you can. Studies have shown that graphics and stories will signnificantly increase your audience's ability to both understand and remember your messages.
Avoid negative messages, which usually involve one of the n words: never, no, none, nobody and not.
Be aware that one negative message needs three positive messages to counter it.
Similarly, avoid absolutes, such as all, always, every.

Perception of risk

The perception of a risk is a combination of the reality of the risk and the emotion of the audience.

Risks are more feared if they are perceived as:

unexpected;
unfair;
unavoidable; or
unknown.

Try to avoid using messages that convey any of these. They can often slip into messages and you should edit carefully, to weed them out.

Completing the map

Reference

In most situations, this can be an incremental number, such as MSG01, and so on.

You may be tempted to include a reference to a risk and perhaps to the risk management action that the message addresses, such R07 and Mitigate. It is better than risks and messages are separate.

Remember that one message can apply to more than one risk, so it may not be a good idea to tie a message to a single risk. You draw up a chart showing the links between risks and messages that will show any one-to-many and even many-to-many relationships.

Topic

This should be the main topic that the message map supports, such as Chemical leak.

Summary / question

This is either a summary of the message, such as Containment, or the question that the message answers, such as Is there a danger to the public?.

Key message x

The form shows three key messages, which will usually be sufficient for high-stress situations. In other situations, you may have more time to deliver messages, so you can use up to seven key messages. Just use more forms.

Each key message should be up to nine words long, such as Control systems switch on automatically for chemical leaks. This may have started as a longer sentence: Emergency control sytems will switch on automatically when chemical leak is detected.

Having said that, you should not constrain messages. If your key message only makes sense using ten or eleven words long, don't worry about compressing it further.

Evidence / story x.y

This can be a graphic, a photograph, a newspaper cutting, a URL with a brief description, an attributed quotation, or a story from a supporter or third party.

It should be something tangible, that can be given to the people receiving the message.

You should also check that your first key message can be communicated without depending on its supporting material. It needs to be strong enough to stand alone.

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