Trigger Warning

This comes with a trigger warning.

Because it’s good to think about triggers.

Triggers help people act, and whether that’s to change behaviour or to remember to do a thing, a comms team will be looking for triggers.

Take housing for example – we want people to be safe in their homes, and we don’t want to lose an asset – so as the weather gets colder, or the Christmas songs start playing in the shops, we’d run campaigns around fire safety and electrical safety, sending Christmas or holiday cards to residents telling them how to check their Christmas lights for damage.

They’re already thinking about Christmas, so that’s when to trigger… not mid-summer, when they’d have to go in the loft and get the bloody things.

But what about internal comms and change comms, that may be a bit more subtle and difficult to see where the trigger points are, and what’s the best medium.

You can blanket an organisation with information and narratives around change, but unless you can trigger action, it sort of sits like a blanket. Thing is, people don’t always want triggers, or think triggers are even there.

Jonah Berger talks about it in his brilliant book “Contagious”, talks about two slogans used on college students to see if they would eat more fruit and veg.

One slogan “Live the healthy way, eat five fruits and veggies a day” and the other “each and every dinning-hall tray needs five fruits and veggies a day” were trailed against each other. The group with the dining hall tray slogan said it was corny and didn’t like it… but ate 25% more fruit and veg compared to the other group – it was such a specific trigger it changed behaviour.

Honestly, if you’re interested in comms and messaging, get his book it’s pretty much essential.

Anyway… back to triggers in change.

I was working on a digital change project, launching an organisation wide voip phone launch. Transitioning from desk bound phones to hotdesking mobile integration. There were training sessions and emails, but people weren’t logging in.

It wasn’t in the rhythm of their day.

My team sat down and mapped out what the actions of the morning were, from getting into the office to being ready for work and we say an unused bit of real-estate that everyone in the organisation saw.

We had posters in the corridor, we had reminders on doors, and then a very simple message as desktop wallpaper, pushed out by ICT on to all work computers simply saying “log on to the phone system” or similar.

The day was beginning, work was happening, the message came up and there’s the trigger for action, great timing, great trigger, simple work around.

It was a completely partial success.

What we hadn’t accounted for was that there was a cohort of users who just closed their laptops at the end of the day and didn’t restart them, so the group protocols weren’t being updated… and they didn’t see the message… so we had to start another campaign to get the buggers to actually log off and restart because they weren’t getting the windows updates.

So think about your project’s triggers, where should they be? What’s the context for them?

And be prepared for the bits you hadn’t thought of to get in the way