Nobody knows how to craft a message quite like Emma Stratton. As the founder of B2B positioning firm Punchy and best-selling author of Make It Punchy, she’s trained marketing teams and developed messaging strategies for some of the world’s leading tech companies, from Salesforce to Uber. This September, she’ll take the SchoolCEO Conference stage in Dallas, Texas, to share how her industry-leading secrets apply to school communications.
We sat down with Stratton to discuss how schools can make sure their most important messages land—and give us a preview of what attendees will learn from her session.
In your work, you talk about “value-based communication." What does that mean, and how can it help school districts communicate more effectively?
I have a framework: Value comes first, benefit comes second, and the feature comes last. Lead with the why: “Why should I care?” Then what comes next is the benefit: “What will I be able to do that I couldn't do before?” And then finally is the how: “How are you going to make that happen?”
I came up with this process because I realized that we often write backwards. We explain everything, then we eventually get to what you'll get and why you should care. But for the audience, that's like listening to someone get on a podium and read a book report. It's boring. It's too much to take in. And because it's just too much, the person's like, "I don't even care about this."
Instead of giving this long, drawn-out explanation about what this program is, what we really want to do is show someone why they should even care about it. When we're out in the world reading anything, looking at anything, we all selfishly want to know: "What's in it for me?” That’s the question we need to be answering: Why does this matter for this audience?
Leading with why they should care will get their attention. That's going to signal to them, "I need to read this," or, "This matters." Then, once you've drawn them in, add the “what”: a few things that your audience is going to learn or see or find out about. And finally, tell them the “how”—what you’re going to do to make that happen.
Next time you write something out, check the order once you've written it. Is the most important thing at the beginning, or have you left it at the end? Have you led with “why,” or are you leading with “how”?
How can school communicators identify the value they should lead with?
I like to play the "So What?" game. You might say “Our school district is running a canned food drive”—so what? “So each class can start collecting dry food goods”—so what? “So the kids can focus on civic duty”—so what? “So we can create well-rounded citizens”—so what? Imagining a bored teenager saying "So what?" pushes you to get towards the “what” and the “why.” It's just a natural way to put yourself in the shoes of the audience and get to what they’re going to care about.
I work with people in tech, and they just talk about their technology and no one understands it. The "So What?" game helps them get out of the technology and into the benefits—what people can do and why they should care. It works for anything: a school program, initiative, anything at all. Whenever you're talking about something, just ask yourself, "So what?"
What’s one question school communicators should ask themselves to make sure their message resonates with their audience?
"Have I led with the most important thing for them to know?" Read the first sentence. Is that the most important thing? It's probably not. I think a lot of people use preamble—we're gearing up, setting the stage—but people don't have time for that. They just want to know what they need to know. Have you led with the most important thing? And if not, can you find it and put it at the front?
In journalism, you're not supposed to bury the lede. The idea is that you lead with the most important piece of information, and then the next sentence is the next important, and so on, all the way to the least important. That way, if the editor has to cut the story short, you're not cutting out anything important. If your audience only read the first paragraph, would they get the gist of it? If the answer is no, find the most important information and bring it up to the front.
As somebody whose whole business is written communication, how do you feel about AI?
I think AI is actually a great tool for high-volume communications. The most important thing, though, is to be in the driver's seat of the AI. You can't say, “Write me something about this," because AI is just going to have fun and make up stuff. You have to be very clear about what you’re trying to convey—about the “why,” the “what” and the “how.” You don’t have to find the perfect words, but you do need to know what the most important thing is. You don't want to outsource that to AI, because I think that's outside of integrity. That’s letting the machine decide. You still need to do the thinking about why this is important. You need to be directing it and giving it the guidelines.
The cool thing is, you can say, "Here's what's most important, and here's what they're going to learn—can you write an email specifically for parents?" And an Al will write it. That's where I think you should absolutely lean on AI: to smooth it out, to shorten it, to polish things, to get drafts down. But you want to be very clear about the input. If you're saying it's for a parent audience, I think it's worth specifying "a parent audience who cares about X," or else the AI's going to decide what the parent cares about. Just guide it. Then, when it’s given you something, look at it and ask: What's missing? Does this all make sense? Because it's not perfect. Don't give up control; put the strategic input in, review what comes back and adjust as needed.
At the end of the day, school communication is all about connecting with your stakeholders. How can leaders and communicators craft their messages to build better connections?
Your natural way of wording something is often better than how you write when you feel pressure to write in a certain way. You might think, "I'm writing an important email to parents, so I'm gonna make it buttoned-up and serious." Of course, you want to sound like you can be trusted, but I think the way you would naturally write would make it more relatable, more understandable, more clear. And you might get to the point faster. That is my whole schtick in the tech world: Write like a human. Humanize things.
To give you an example, I recently got an email from my superintendent. There has been a lot of drama—two schools are closing, and it's been very painful for the community. She wrote a huge email saying this is finally happening and apologizing for the mess. It was a good email. It took accountability. It acknowledged things on a human level. I actually read the whole thing because it was an important, hard email, and instead of hiding behind things or distancing from it, she just owned it.
I often tell people: “Say it like you would at a barbecue." It's a prompt to be more conversational. It builds trust. We want to talk to other humans; we want to feel a connection. If you have been able to connect on that level in any communication, you have won.