Systems + strategy
I’m paying more attention to the infrastructure underneath the campaign.
More and more, a client asks for a campaign and we find ourselves mapping who owns the list, who can approve an email, where audience data lives, whether partner outreach is tracked, what happens when a social idea gets approved on Tuesday and needs to be produced by Thursday, and who is responsible for telling the next person what changed.
None of that is glamorous, and all of it shapes whether the strategy can survive contact with the week. I think communications teams are going to spend a lot more time designing these operating systems, especially as AI makes production faster. Faster output creates more pressure on the parts of the organization that still depend on judgment, coordination, memory, and trust.
Pace + AI
Speed is useful. I’m less convinced it should be the goal.
AI can give us forty options before lunch. That sounds like an advantage until everyone is sorting through forty options, five stakeholders are reacting to different versions, and nobody has had time to ask which behavior the work is supposed to move.
I’m watching speed change the texture of communications work. The organizations that seem to benefit most are the ones with enough clarity to know what deserves acceleration. The strategic advantage seems to live in discernment: knowing what should move quickly, what needs time, what needs another conversation, and what can be left alone.
There’s some data underneath that feeling, too. In Pew’s 2025 workplace research, opens in a new tab, workers who had used AI chatbots were more likely to say the tools helped them work faster than improve the quality of their work, 40% compared with 29%. That does not tell us what good communications should look like, but it does make me more interested in the relationship between speed, attention, and judgment, especially when the technology is making it easier to produce before we have fully decided what deserves producing.
Inclusive design
Accessibility is changing the questions we ask at the beginning.
Every time we apply the Accessibility Communications Index, the useful questions seem to arrive earlier in the process. Who is this brief imagining? What does someone need to understand before they can act? Where are we relying on a visual cue, prior knowledge, a physical route, or a format that works for only part of the audience?
Once those questions enter the brief, they start improving decisions that extend well beyond disability access. The message gets clearer. The participation path gets easier to follow. The team has to become more specific about the experience it is trying to create. That is one reason I keep thinking about accessibility as a source of strategic discipline.
The scale of the gap is still pretty staggering. WebAIM’s 2025 analysis of one million home pages, opens in a new tab found detectable WCAG failures on 94.8% of them, with an average of 51 detectable accessibility errors per page. I read a number like that and think about how often accessibility still enters the process after the important decisions have already been made. It keeps reinforcing the value of asking better questions while the brief is still open.
Audience relationships
You can feel the difference between having an audience and having a relationship with one.
We keep walking into situations where an organization has followers, subscribers, attendees, registrants, members, or a very large email list and still cannot quite tell you what relationship exists between those people and the institution. That gap usually becomes visible the moment something changes: a new program launches, an old audience stops showing up, a message needs to travel beyond the people who already know the organization, or leadership needs people to act instead of simply notice.
I’ve become increasingly interested in the small signals that tell you a real relationship is forming. People come back. They reply. They bring somebody with them. They ask for the experience in another place. They trust the organization enough to tell it when something did not work. Those behaviors are harder to summarize in a dashboard, and they are often the evidence I trust most when I’m trying to understand whether communications is actually creating connection.
Communications scholarship has had a language for some of this for years. A 2023 meta-analysis in Public Relations Review, opens in a new tab pulled together 67 studies involving more than 30,000 participants and found strong relationships between organization-public relationship quality and things like engagement, authenticity, transparency, advocacy, positive word of mouth, and information seeking. I like that frame because it gives us something more useful to look for than reach alone, and it puts some research language around behaviors we are already seeing in the field.
Live engagement
Small, engaged rooms are starting to feel more valuable.
Live experiences give us something digital channels have trouble reproducing: a chance to watch where people lean in, where language loses them, what they ask when a form is not standing between us, and who they bring into the conversation next.
A recent event had a smaller crowd than we planned for and still gave us unusually useful feedback about the experience itself. That tension is worth paying attention to. Scale matters in some moments. In others, a small, invested group becomes the research, the relationship, and the distribution network all at once. I think the opportunity is to design live engagement with much clearer intent about which kind of room we are trying to create.
Live engagement + learning
When the audience isn’t quite there yet, what is the room still telling you?
Sometimes the number you planned around simply does not materialize. Attendance is easy to count, easy to compare against the goal, and usually the first thing everyone wants to talk about afterward. I’m trying to resist the instinct to let that one number tell the whole story before we have looked carefully at what actually happened in the room.
I’m paying more attention to what people do once they arrive: whether they stay, how long they talk, what they ask, where the language loses them, whether they come back to a question later, and whether they ask for the experience to show up somewhere else. Those signals do not erase the difference between the turnout we hoped for and the turnout we got. They can still tell us what to preserve, what to change, and where the work may need to travel next.
Sometimes the pivot is practical: the hour changes, the invitation gets more specific, the food gets better, the partner mix shifts, or the experience moves into a gathering where the audience already is. Sometimes the learning is that people are interested in the subject and not yet ready to organize their evening around it. The numbers still matter. I just do not want the number to be the only thing we learn from the room.
