Throwing Spaghetti at the Walls

At one of my jobs a very long time ago, at a very large foundation (which I will not name, but it should be transparently clear which one I’m talking about), I was the communications lead for one team and my colleague and good friend was the team director for another. He and I worked on distinct, but related issues having to do with the healthcare system, and there was one period in particular when we were very, very busy. It was the year before the Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law, and although we were legally prohibited from lobbying directly for specific legislation or candidates, we still had many grantee organizations producing research or managing projects that, as it turned out, were highly relevant to the debates about what should and shouldn’t be in ACA.

We ended up providing a great deal of communications support to grantee organizations.  I won’t specify what the nature of this support was, because even to this day, I still get nervous about the rules pertaining to permissible foundation activities, but I can tell you that we took great care to color inside the lines and moreover, this organization had always provided a great deal of communications support to grantee organizations, because people there believed that communications was an important means of amplifying impact. In other words, if you fund an organization to do things that, say, improve healthcare for patients who are struggling with navigating different parts of the healthcare system, and that organization actually succeeds, it’s not a bad idea to help that organization share what and how they did, so that other organizations might be inspired to do the same.

Anyway, I digress. During this very busy time, I was responsible for developing and leading a massive communications strategy, which was outlined in a plan – a written document that specified the goals, objectives, tactics, and desired outcomes of what we were trying to achieve with our communications efforts. At that time, we in the communications department were required to write down our communications plans, so I’m sure my colleague’s team also had one. But even so, I was struck by the contrast between my colleague’s team’s approach to communications and mine. My goal, at the time, was all about sticking to the plan, whereas his team’s approach to disseminating information felt more like: “Throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.”

My description is a riff, of course, on the old idea of testing cooked spaghetti for doneness – if it’s sufficiently cooked, it will stick to the wall. (I would now argue that spaghetti that sticks to a wall is not only unhygienic, but also perhaps overcooked.) But I want to make it clear that I didn’t think his approach was worse or better than my tidier, stick-to-the-strategy approach. As far as I could tell, he was doing everything possible to make sure that his team’s funding produced as much information and resources as possible and then to make sure that all of this information and knowledge got in the hands of as many people as possible who might be able to do something with the information and resources. And as far as I can tell, his team had massive success in doing exactly that.

Ever since then, I have thought about the upsides and downsides of targeted strategies versus the spaghetti/blitz/flood the airwaves approach to communications. And I am especially thinking about this now, because I am wondering if the current environment we’re facing, in which the Trump Administration is baselessly and often illegally attacking everything that we in the social sector hold dear, is better suited for a targeted/strategic approach to communications or whether we need the spaghetti approach.  

First, let’s look at the benefits of being all, you know, targeted and strategic when it comes to communications:

• One, targeted communications strategies help guide resource allocation – and I’m not just talking about budget, I’m also talking about staffing resources. When you have a clear plan about what you’re trying to achieve with your communications strategies, the plan helps everyone understand their respective roles and responsibilities in achieving the goals. It’s not fun (understatement) to have all of the people involved in a shared endeavor running around like chickens in different directions. Either you need to have a super-expert herder on board (sorry for all the animal analogies, I’ve been spending too much time on animal TikTok) or you risk burning out each and every one of your team members.
• Two, being focused and strategic in communications can help create alignment among all the people who are most actively involved in carrying out communications strategies. One of the most common problems people mention to me, when it comes to communications at their organization, is that “everyone sounds like they’re talking about and doing different things” when it comes to their organization’s mission and work. That is, on one level, a branding problem, and on another level, it signals a lack of alignment and understanding around messaging and communications strategies and tactics.
• Three, communications plans help people articulate metrics – what milestones, benchmarks, or achievements will let them know that their communication strategies are working. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how important this one is, because the evaluation and assessment of communications efforts has always been a mess. In communications, people are more focused on what’s to come versus studying what just happened, so many people end up relying on the crudest of measures, like email open rates or conference attendance or media hits. And in general, not enough people resource communications at nonprofits and foundations, let alone resource the assessment of whether it’s working or not. But I’ve always felt dishonest proposing a communications strategy without accompanying specifications of, “This is how we’ll know this is working.” Maybe I’m just old school in that respect.

So those are some of the benefits of being targeted, of being strategic, of being super-disciplined about how one goes about communicating about important topics – like healthcare, like education, like climate change, like reproductive rights, like gender equality, like racial equity. (You know: I feel like I just listed words that would trigger a Trump witch hunt and it actually felt a little fun to do it.) But here are some of the reasons why I think the moment might also need the spaghetti approach:  

• First, the digital landscape is much bigger, and much more corrupt, than before. Which means that we need to show up in more places to reach more people.  As an example of how this might play out, people who want Democrats or progressives to win elections keep on pointing to Republican-friendly communicators like Joe Rogan or the Heritage Foundation or Fox News as if those tactics are easily replicable. I really do not think they are. One, it is hard to separate what was intentional manipulation versus a serendipitous appeal to disenchanted voters. Two, many of the strategies and tactics adopted by the Republican Party are based on dishonesty and lies and foreign interference and I just don’t think most Democratic and progressive leaders are willing to go there. I know I’m not. But Democrats could consider showing up in more places – especially ones that feel more experimental and less proven when it comes to engaging audiences on issue areas. We in communications are facing not just a proliferation of platforms and channels, but also a muddying of standards and integrity related to those channels. Not only do we have many more places we have to show up in, we can’t quite write off any of those platforms and channels as “not worth it.”  Getting a headline or an op-ed in the New York Times or Washington Post on your issue, with your spokesperson, used to be a big, big deal in my field. Nowadays, legacy media outlets are receiving justifiable criticism and blowback on the meddling and false equivalencies driven by their corporate overlords and their overriding desire to, you know, make money and drive traffic. But do you know anyone who would turn down an opportunity to pitch to either outlet? I don’t. We can’t completely write off the legacy media, but we also don’t have straightforward alternatives to turn to, so we have to keep on fishing for the elusive “opt-out,” “low-information” voters that we keep hearing about. That poses a huge challenge for communicators working to get across important ideas on important – nay, absolutely critical – topics. We are faced with the daunting task of being everywhere – and of guessing at where those low-information, apolitical, highly segmented voters might be hanging out, and what might influence their engagement in politics and social matters.
• Two, there are too many theories out there about what we need to do to “win” on our issues. Actually, most of the theories are focused on what the Democrats need to do to win back the country, but since most communicators working in the social sector work on what have now become progressive-coded issues – there, I said it, although it still boggles my mind that things like “education” and “healthcare” and “reproductive autonomy” and “clean air and water” are not what everyone wants – the theories are very applicable to communications in the social sector write large. The independent journalist Josh Marshall, in his latest bulletin, outlined two of these theories, one from Matt Yglesias on how the Democrats need to message differently about things like fossil fuels and guns so they can win more elections, and the other from Jonathan Last proposing that Democrats should stop worrying about unified messaging and re-branding and instead be a better opposition party, since Trump’s policies are deeply unpopular. (I think calling them “policies” is a stretch, I think we honestly have to think of them instead as “the unhinged late-night ramblings of a deeply ill, cruel person.”) I admit, I found Last’s argument to be more compelling, but my overall point is this: it’s all so overwhelming, trying to figure out what communications strategies might work on a particular issue, these days. There’s just too much going on and everyone I know is feeling exhausted and burned-out and overwhelmed.

With all the communications challenges we’re facing, one could argue that this is the time to throw spaghetti at the wall – to try everything and anything, to try and be everywhere, with our messages and our stories and our facts and our charismatic (we hope) spokespeople and leaders.  But there’s an obvious obstacle to the spaghetti approach:  there are so few organizations that are in the position to take on the spaghetti approach. My colleague and I, at that long-ago job, could experiment with different approaches to communications because we worked at an organization that fundamentally believed that communications was part of creating the desired impact. We were given resources to do a great deal when it came to producing and capturing knowledge, and changing people’s hearts and minds, and we were allowed to try different things. But I have been at organizations that believed and acted in exactly the opposite manner.

I guess what I’m arguing for, during these perilous times, is that leaders and organizations during these perilous times should be playing to their communication strengths. For those that have the vision, experience, and courage to do the maximum, they should be doing it all – massive amounts of spaghetti-throwing, with the full expectation that only some strands will stick, but those strands will make a difference in engaging with people we need to support our causes and defend and protect a vision of America that is full of goodness and hope and caring for each other. I confess, if these big players exist, I would like to see some evidence of strategic thinking and aligned messaging, but I’d be happy, at this point, just knowing that they’re out there and that they’re taking big swings at some very big challenges.

For other organizations that are less well-resourced, I kind of want them to get a pass on thinking about or tackling the big communications challenges, so they can continue working on achieving targeted, thoughtfully-designed, communications successes on behalf of their organization and/or issue area. I say this because I know that there are people out there who are one of a few communications staffers at their org, and they are people who still have to make sure the website is up to date, the report gets released, the reporter calls get answered, the newsletter goes out….and they’re experiencing the cognitive dissonance that happens when your whole world is under threat, but, you know, you’ve still got to do your job. For those people, I would say: doing your job is still worthwhile. Sometimes, it really is enough to change the lives of a few people, or a few hundred, for the better. Sometimes, a story about a smaller-sized impact can have a ripple effect that can ladder up to much bigger changes that can sometimes take years and even decades to witness. I guess I’m arguing that both the spaghetti approach and the targeted approach still matter, if both are aiming to get us at the same destination: a better world for all people, not just a few.