Ever seen an ad on social media that made you wonder, “What on earth was that company thinking?” Or read an email from a charity that made you tear up—and make a donation—in the blink of an eye?
Almost every human on earth is bombarded with thousands of messages per day. Only a few get remembered. There’s an art, and a bit of science, to making yours stick.
A Better Way to Say That explores why some messages work and others don’t. Once a month we’ll dissect the trends, technologies, and Weird Tricks that shape how people are communicating with each other in 2024—and what that means for your organization.
Awhile back, I saw another professional comms person lamenting the state of the world (as we all do every morning now). He ended his thought-train with, “Okay, time to go send my silly little emails about games!” Sending our silly little emails has become an online cliche, but I did have some real advice for him: find a pro bono project.
At PSE, we’ve dedicated a solid amount of time each week for volunteer projects that address issues we feel are important. While it doesn’t fix everything, these projects have sure made this bad year a bit better.
So here’s my advice on why this is a good thing for you to take on, and at the end, a few pointers that we’ve learned on how best to make it work.
Finally, a few suggestions for how best to work together, gathered from our 15+ years of experience:
And if you’d like to work with us, in any capacity, hit the silly little email button below!
Because the last word is rarely the end of the conversation.
Much like penguins, we enjoy bringing you little gifts to show we care:
In less than a year, a river in the Pacific Northwest came back to life after dams were removed—allowing salmon, beavers, otters, turtles, and more to return to their native habitats.
ProPublica is now hiring a Local Reporting Network Fellow in five different states, with a salary of up to $75,000 plus an allowance for benefits.
The Wall St. Journal’s recent report about the barely-trying “safety training” of AI modelsis the latest piece to unintentionally raise the question: what’s the point of all this, anyway?
Here’s what one of us is currently reading:
“Rivals screamed at him like a giant flock of crows, he wrote. It felt like being in the middle of a huge sandstorm when they attacked him, or being savaged by animals: ‘they were like a swarm of wasps suddenly flying in one’s face.’”
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World - Peter Frankopan
Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes “a great beach read.” If you’re a fan of wide-ranging historical epics packed full of weird, amusing details that make you view our contemporary world in a different light, then this Oxford historian’s 2015 book makes the perfect interlude between swims and naps.
Frankopan’s objective was to help the reader understand how interconnected human societies have been for thousands of years, and The Silk Roads is packed with tidbits that drive this point home (like how a minor 8th century British king stamped his coins with Arabic phrasing to piggyback on the prestige of the Abbassid Caliphate, which stretched from North Africa to Central Asia).
The most thought-provoking parts of the book, though, come from passages like the one above. For as much as we imagine ourselves to live in a uniquely disorienting age, there’s some comfort in knowing that people* have always felt a little overwhelmed by the state of the world these days.
*The quote above cites the writing of Gregory of Nazianzus, an archbishop of Constantinople in the fourth century.
