Maximise impact with persuasive key messages

To truly persuade audiences, we should put key messages at the heart of our writing and editing strategies. These key messages should be the pieces of your report most likely to stick in people's memories. By David Walker.

Key messages are what we most want the public to know about a given report or issue. They answer the simple question "what did you find out".

These key messages will usually make or break a report. This is hard to overemphasise. If your key messages persuade your audience to do what you think is right, then your report is succeeding. If they don't, it's failing.

To give our reports persuasive impact, we usually set out draft key messages explicitly to the internal team as early as we can, and evolve them as we go. Such messages keep the whole team on the same page. They help the team make their own statements and evaluate other people's. They remind the team to look for new key messages. And they help to drive the creation of a report which will persuade the audiences it needs to persuade.

Key messages should be a cornerstone of any report strategy.

Note: Read this guide in tandem with our suggestions on executive summaries. Often the key messages document and the executive summary will overlap.  

Reality 1: Decision-makers are busy and pressured

Decision-makers come to your report already busy. They are probably working more than 50 hours a week and charged with decisions that will alter people's lives. In one YouGov survey of UK managers, it is claimed that 47 per cent of those surveyed "expressed feelings of being overwhelmed" (though there is evidence that more successful leaders manage the pressures better).

John Daley is a former High Court judge's associate, McKinsey consultant, ANZ bank executive, and founding CEO of Australian think-tank the Grattan Institute. Daley ranks the decision-maker's sheer busy-ness as the most common mistake report authors make when they think about their audiences. "You're talking to senior decision-makers." he says. "The thing that is invariably true about senior decision-makers is they are really, really time-poor. They just don't have time to do anything. And they certainly don't have time to get across the detail very much. And consequently, they are paying you to get across the detail and to think through that detail and synthesise it and realise that the consequence of all that is, you know, a conclusion. But what they want is the conclusion."

People in this state need any communications to get right to the point. You can best get their attention by providing them with potential solutions, in a few crisp sentences, using simple language, in minute one: "To get from A to B, we recommend doing X, Y and Z". After that, you are much more likely to have their permission to go into the factors driving your declaration. You'll have shown expertise and confidence, and – perhaps most important of all – you'll have shown you share their desire to solve an important problem. (And if they don't care about getting from A to B, you need to rethink your messages.)

Reality 2: People forget a lot (and most barely read in the first place)

Key messages matter largely because of four uncomfortable realities:

1. Most people will not read all of a big document. They're often busy, or not heavily invested in the subject matter. They want the gist, in five minutes or less.
2. People tend to forget most of what they read. This is confronting to read, but research backs it up: almost all of the words in those reports, emails, web pages, magazines and books evaporate from memory with terrifying speed.
   
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   One example: Pamela Paul, former editor of the New York Times Book Review, controlled one of the world's most prestigious book publications. Yet while editor, she told The Atlantic that even she couldn't remember what was in the books she read. “I remember the physical object," she said. "… I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t remember – and it’s terrible – is everything else.” Research suggests she's not the exception; she's the rule. (People can remember better when they practice retrieving the information several times, at intervals. But that is hard for an outsider to arrange, and almost no-one does it naturally.)
3. Most people can't synthesise the most important points from a large volume of content when they first come across it. A few can, and this skill is valuable precisely because it is rare. 
4. People won't prioritise what they remember. Fragments of data lodge in our memories for all sorts of unpredictable reasons. You can probably clearly remember incidents from your childhood better that that list of items your boss told you last month.

Authors of big, complex documents usually want to show their work. But on its own, that usually doesn't do much for most their readers, because most of their readers – even those with the best memories – are going to forget most of the detail.

So we should prepare to share our knowledge by pinpointing its most important elements for our readers. Those are our key messages. We put them up-front, with the detail standing behind them.

Caution: We usually do need much more than just key messages:

• Some readers – among them our most important targets – will want to drill down into various parts of the detail.
• Many other readers will be reassured to know the detail is there, even if they don't immediately look at it.
• Our own teams will sometimes need to check how they came to a key conclusion.

So we should make it clear that we have more detail, and make it easy for interested readers to drill down from your key messages into that detail. (Hyperlinks are a powerful and underused tool here.)

Solution: Write key messages that count

Shorewalker DMS can compile your report's entire key messages document. We aim to fit these messages on a maximum of two A4 pages. Some experts prefer to aim for one page; a few organisations, such as the Grattan Institute, have even enforced a one-page limit.

The impact of those few hundred words will be reflected everywhere:

• the executive summary in the report itself, which may look very much like the key messages
• the report's body text, which should support and reflect those messages 
• the report's recommendations and key graphics
• the content we generate from the report, including:
• the online summary
• tweets
• other social media material
• the opinion piece by the minister or chairman
• email content
• blog posts
• and more
• the content generated by others, from independent opinion pieces to social posts to speeches by advocates
• and yes, the announcement the minister or CEO makes when they implement the report's findings.

Kym from HR and Courtney from accounting will mention one of those messages to their friends over lunch. Joe will paste a piece of the executive summary into an email to his boss. People we've never heard of will summarise our work in channels we barely know exist. And they will use variations on the words that we first wrote for that key messages document.

When we give these messages the greatest possible attention, we maximise our chances of success.

Recipe: Set out challenges, solutions and benefits

BEST PRACTICE: The key messages document should aim to describe the most important messages that the report will attempt to transmit or support. It should contain, for instance, all the high-impact lines – and the key visuals – that will go into the executive summary.

A well-done key messages document will focus its attention on just three types of statement:

• the challenges that we face
• our recommended solutions to those challenges
• the benefits of those recommendations for our audiences.

The report's recommended actions, in particular, must be the heart of most reports. Recommended actions are, after all, what separates a report from other types of writing.

Deciding on the most important recommendations can be a difficult exercise; we'll be tempted to include more rather than less. Fight that temptation. If we want to have impact, we have to decide what messages we care most about.

Everything in the key messages document should be credibly supportable from the work that has been done. The information must be true, supportable and, if possible, quantifiable. This is not a space to make hyperbolic claims, either. Indeed, if someone goes further than the report justifies, the key message document should make it easy to spot the inaccurate or inflated claim and rein the offender quickly back in.

By addressing these two things, you will:

• focus you on the messages that matter most to people
• be able to answer many of the toughest questions
• build understanding of what you're doing amongst your audiences
• create a consistent response to queries
• ensure that the public hears key messages from many sources
• provide the basis for other documents and statements.

Extras

The key messages document may also briefly set out:

• a brief explanation of:
  • the stakeholders on whose behalf we speak
  • the audiences to whom we are speaking
• the language we'll use (such as "we" rather than "the government")
• instances of hero content, whether these are pieces of statistical data or 12-word sentences that pithily express important ideas
• real-world examples as well as abstractions – for instance, “six ways that XXXXX can change our city/region/industry/country”
• quotes that actual people gave during the research phase, particularly if the report contains some sort of survey

We may also want to include message variations to be used in specific media, from tweets to radio interviews to discussions with the minister to public presentations. But these usually go in a separate document.

Identify key messages early

BEST PRACTICE: We look to identify and invest in key messages early – right from the very start of the authoring process. We can start writing the key messages document at the same time as we start trying to write the report's detail. And as the report evolves, this document can be continually updated. Shorewalker DMS often advises creators to involve someone who can identify and refine key messages – usually but not always an editor – as soon as drafting begins.

The details of a report often take time to resolve. But crucial elements in the report are usually evident early. (When a report's key messages can't even be guessed at early in the process, it's worth asking whether the organisation should commit to publishing the report.) 

So a first draft of the key messages document can be made early in the report-writing process. And once it is started, it will always give the earliest indication of what the report has to say – of whether, in fact, it has ideas worth writing down. We can then review and update it regularly with the team. As elements emerge which seem likely to have high impact, start concentrating more of your detail efforts on refining those, seeking more evidence, building case studies, planning graphics and so on.

Creative leaders in many fields use this approach to heighten impact. For example, the film editor Joe Walker (Sicario, 12 Years a Slave, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) has spoken of how he now "edits backwards" as much as possible. Walker identifies the key shot in each pivotal scene and works backwards from these key shots to construct the scenes that make up the film. We generally recommend a similar approach for your report, based around key messages.

The focus on key messages can be confronting. It asks the team right away what they really have to say. But it also enables the creation of an exciting team challenge: identify important things to say, and we'll spotlight your work. (It also lets us flag early how much impact the report is likely to have.)

CAUTION: Many project leaders and editors advise report-writers to write all the elements of a report before developing any key messages. That practice often creates problems. If we leave the key message document until late in the process, we can find that we have misallocated the team's time and effort, neglecting our best points. By then it's often too late to review or rewrite: the report has weak key messages, too much filler ... and may have already gone to senior staff or independent reviewers in this low-impact state.

Build messages into stories

BEST PRACTICE: Build one or more stories into the key messages. Use the simple situation-complication-resolution framework. Stories leave a mark on memory, in a way that collections of facts and bullet-point lists do not.

We are story-centred animals. We give them our attention; they create understanding; they provoke emotion and action.

Stories work in two ways:

• Presenters can tell them more easily and with more enthusiasm.
• Audiences remember them better.

Impact-oriented consulting firms like McKinsey spend a disproportionate amount of their report-writing time working at telling stories, typically in presentation format. Outsiders exposed to this process for the first time find it strange and a bit obsessive. But the result, which you may have seen for yourself, is that their presentations are rated as far more powerful than the average.

You may want to break your key stories into a separate key stories document.

Build out key messages as we go

BEST PRACTICE: We will spend much of our editing and writing time thinking about content for key messages.

Shorewalker DMS estimates that on a per-word basis, key messages should generally get between ten and fifty times as much work per word as normal text.

Ask these questions over and over

As we write, we aim to keep asking:

• Is this one of the key messages of our report?
• Do we believe in it?
• What extra evidence do we need for it?
• What will make it more vivid and memorable?
• Can we turn it into a full-blown story?
• Does it lead to a recommendation?

If content doesn't support a key message, downplay it 

If we can't resolve these questions positively for some issue, we can consider:

• shortening that content
• moving it to an appendix
• eliminating it.

Yes, sometimes reports are written simply to capture everything that's known about an issue. And when your staff has spent two months learning every nuance of an issue, they will want to put that work in the report.

But usually reports exist to spur action. Content that doesn't do that often lacks a reason to be in the report at all. So resist the pressure to fill the report up. If need be, put less compelling material into an appendix or supporting document. 

If you're ever seen a long report which didn't say anything much of importance, chances are that its authors were writing without the key messages in mind.

At Shorewalker DMS, we've cut reports by 50 per cent and then listened as heard organisational leaders remarked on how much more vivid and powerful they now seemed. It's a curious thing, but it's real. When we cut out unneeded material, the stories and other key ideas stand out. The content suddenly looms larger. 

And people in an organisation feel better about a report whose conclusions they can enthuse about. From ministers and chairmen to public relations staff, people like to support big, interesting ideas and tell interesting stories.

Inside the key messages document

The key messages document is the most important document we will write in creating almost any report. The key messages document should include the most important findings and recommendations – all the messages of which you really want to convince audiences.

This document must be:

• memorable, so that its content will roll off the tongue of a CEO, minister or spokesperson
• vivid, so that spokespeople and media releases cut through in a packed media environment
• brief (ideally no more than two pages, or even one), so that a CEO, minister or spokesperson can recount it when asked
• thorough enough that it contains the most important messages
• convincing to people who hear some of its contents, even if they don't pursue more details
• speakable as well as readable.

We can draft a key messages document as soon as we have clarified the report's aims and audiences. You can try that using our Project Start Worksheet.

The key messages document becomes the main reference for several other important report elements.

Key message spinoff 1: Executive summary

BEST PRACTICE: The report's executive summary should do what it says: summarise the report. Base it on the key message document. A typical report reader will read the executive summary and then very little else. This means that within the printed document, the summary should get a disproportionate share of our attention. See our separate analysis of the executive summary.

Key message spinoff 2: Graphics

Graphics, particularly information graphics, can make a more powerful case than ... well, 1000 words. They can turn big piles of data into useful insight. They work everywhere from tweets to Powerpoint presentations to print newspaper articles.

Ideally, we should aim to create a compelling information graphic around each key message in the executive summary. Report creators who plan key graphics early, as an integral part of their key messages, enable other content to be built around them as the report develops. This is harder to do later in the process, when so many issues fight for our attention.

IDEA: The key to powerful graphs: tell the audience what they should take away from what they're looking at. This means crafting a powerful title for each graph.

You should also aim to buttress key points with graphics wherever possible. Sometimes you won't even need numbers at all. (But anywhere you can see a number, ask whether it can be turned into a graphic.)

IDEA: A particularly powerful graphic can be printed full-page for a minister, CEO or other leadership figure to use as an exhibit when presenting the report to audiences. We also recommend preparing it for use by news media, in open formats which media can re-edit into their own visual style.

IDEA: To improve your graphics, try telling your entire key message set in graphics rather than words.

Key message spinoff 3: Recommendations

Recommendations provide the reader with an agenda for action. How should the business proceed going forward? What new law should the government pass, or what area should it deregulate? Giving people and even institutions meaningful things to do, and we bring a sense of order and direction.

Recommendations are usually highlighted within the relevant discussion in the body of the report. But it's important to also put them at the front of the report, where more people will see them.

BEST PRACTICE: At the front of the report, the recommendations can be integrated into the executive summary. That's often convenient for linking each recommendation to the thinking that produced it. Another approach is to place recommendations together directly after the executive summary. 

IDEA: One underrated alternative is to place the reccomendations before the executive summary. This sends an important meta-message: the report is, first and foremost, about getting things done.