What If Communication Came Earlier? | From the Owner’s Desk

Some thoughts I brought home from WaterJAM about infrastructure, public understanding, and when communication becomes part of the solution.

I spent several days at the WaterJAM Conference last week listening to people who know a whole lot more about water infrastructure than I do. I went because Jpixx has worked with HRSD for more than a decade, and we’re interested in doing more work in the water industry. But I also went to learn.

And I came home thinking about something that isn’t really about water:

When should communication enter a project?

Again and again, I heard about projects where the engineering problem and the human problem existed alongside each other. At one point Newport News Waterworks talked about getting ahead of a significant rate increase with communication. Rather than waiting until customers were angry about the increase, they helped people understand what was happening and why. The message to the rest of the room was pretty clear: don’t wait until you already have a communication crisis.

Another point that kept coming up was how little most of us think about water infrastructure at all. We turn a faucet and water comes out. That’s about as far as most people’s relationship with the system goes. We don’t see the enormous amount of infrastructure, expertise, maintenance, planning and investment required to make that happen reliably every day. Until something goes wrong.

One of the things I heard discussed at WaterJAM was the value of getting the owner, engineers and contractors working together earlier instead of operating in separate stages. When the people who will actually build something can contribute while decisions are still being made, problems can be uncovered earlier. Different expertise can influence the solution. There is more opportunity to innovate and adapt before decisions become expensive to change.

It made intuitive sense to me. And it made me wonder: Why don’t we think about communication the same way?

Often by the time a company like ours gets called, several important decisions have already been made. The audience has been identified, the message has been decided. Someone has determined that the answer is a three-minute video. And then the request becomes: How much will it cost you to make this? But what if the conversation happened earlier? That’s a very different starting point. A communication problem isn’t automatically a video problem. I own a video production company, so this may sound like a strange thing for me to say:

Sometimes another video isn’t the answer.

Maybe one really well-thought-out piece can do the work of several disconnected ones.

Maybe there is one larger story that can be designed from the beginning to generate shorter pieces for several audiences.

Maybe animation is the clearest way to explain something.

Maybe it needs to be a series.

Maybe video is only one piece of the solution and needs to work alongside graphics, public engagement, a website, social media or paid distribution.

Bringing communication expertise in earlier doesn’t necessarily mean spending more. It can mean spending the communication budget better.

It gives us time to understand the audience before deciding what they should see. It gives us the opportunity to make something that can continue working beyond one moment. And it may keep an organization from paying for another piece next year because the first one never really addressed the underlying problem.

That’s what I came home from WaterJAM thinking about.

Jpixx went there looking for opportunities to do more work in water, but I came home asking a slightly different question:

Where are important things not connecting with the people who need to understand them?

That’s the conversation I want Jpixx invited into earlier. Not necessarily when someone knows they need a video, but when they know they have a communication problem.

-Teviya Abrahams, Co-Owner at Jpixx