Community Champion
Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Categories: communication
Staying on message limits the impact of your message being changed as people share it with their colleagues – and this goes for positive marketing messages as well, not just crisis management communications. Having said that, ultimately you can’t stop people talking to others about your project, and from a marketing perspective when the message is positive, you absolutely want them to be talking about it.
These days everyone has an audience. They always have had, as colleagues have convened at the water cooler or around the kettle in the office kitchen. Today they have the tools to share information more quickly with their networks through social media, internal social networks and they’ll add their opinion there as well.
Remember that it’s people who stop projects, not crises. So being prepared in your communications planning for problems gives you a better chance of controlling gossip and unhelpful communications and thus limit the overall impact on your project.
This diagram is very linear but it’s important to recognise that the more you can hear what’s being said by the people hearing your message, the easier it will be for you to either correct the story or respond to their concerns.
Create Feedback Loops
Feedback loops are an essential part of your marketing communication because you need to know what is working. If isn’t working, ditch that method of communication and try something else.
A simple way to start gathering feedback today is to tell people how to give you feedback, for example in the last line in a newsletter article – provide your email address and a call to action to send you their comments. When you do receive and act on feedback close the loop by telling them what you have done with it.
On projects there’s also a formal feedback loop in the form of the post implementation review at the end of a project.
You do get more immediate feedback than that with communication activities, especially if you are talking to someone face-to-face, but I believe it’s worth building formal feedback loops into your marketing activities.
This gives you the chance to track how you are doing and correct your course if necessary. Here’s an example of a project I’ve done this on.
Feedback Improves Satisfaction
We tracked customer satisfaction results monthly. I gave each stakeholder group the opportunity to rate the project team across four measures: management of top issues, communication, planning and delivery. The stakeholder group that gave the project the worst scores was actually the IT department, and that’s the graph you see here. A bit embarrassing because that is the team I work in. The issue was spending so much time communicating to stakeholders outside the project team and my department that my immediate colleagues were getting a rough ride.
There were too many last minute requests from my project team, or assumptions made that didn’t allow the rest of the IT department to do their jobs efficiently. Once I put in place monthly stakeholder satisfaction scores and understood what was going wrong it was a slow but achievable job to turn around the perception of the project and build engagement.
We managed that by using each monthly conversation with department heads to explain how we were addressing their concerns and asking what else we could do to improve the experience of being on the project. We proactively marketed what we were doing differently so they felt listened to.
By taking the feedback into account and acting on it, I was able to manage expectations and improve the both satisfaction and project management practice. It was an exercise in marketing the project and the achievements and there’s a lot more about how it worked in my book, Customer-Centric Project Management if you’re particularly interested in that.
From this project we learned two things. First, you have to be able to adapt what you are doing. And second, satisfied, engaged stakeholders are a huge asset when things go wrong on projects. Putting in the effort helps you build great relationships and that’s a massive advantage when you need to take difficult decisions.
For more information on project marketing and the tools you can use to communicate about your project, watch my PMXPO talk on the topic. You can get it here (and claim a PDU at the same time).
Posted on: February 17, 2016 11:59 PM |
Permalink