4 Reasons Your Messaging Doesn't Move the Needle
High-stakes messaging requires clarity, focus, and the right messenger.
Most chambers and economic development organizations (EDOs) put substantial effort into communications—newsletters, social media posts, event reminders, investor updates, press releases, and more. At first glance, it looks like a healthy marketing program: content is regular, activity is high, and everything appears polished. Yet, none of this means the right people are hearing the right message—or that those messages are actually influencing the outcomes you need.
Volume does not create strategic influence. For general community engagement, frequent and broad communication may be appropriate. Keeping members informed and the community aware is part of your role as a convener and coordinator.
But once your organization prepares for a new Roadmap, capital campaign, or strategic plan, everything changes: the expectations are higher, the audience is different, and critically, what you need from that audience is different.
You're no longer promoting events or memberships. You're relying on the community's most influential leaders and investors to place confidence, resources, and capital behind your vision. To earn new levels of trust, your communications must shift from "keeping everyone updated" to strategically influencing a select group of decision-makers.
Before you launch a new, ambitious initiative, avoid these four communication pitfalls at all costs that quietly erode investor confidence.
Many organizations default to high-frequency communication because it feels productive. In practice, sending more often produces worse outcomes.
A community leader may receive 15 emails from their chamber for every one they receive from a colleague or friend. Friends communicate when something relevant is top of mind, whereas your chamber communicates when their calendar says they should. One gets read, the other gets archived.
When audiences receive too much communication, they cannot parse what is relevant from what is simply informational. Your high-stakes audiences don't want activity—they want direction and alignment. An abundance of updates, recaps, and event reminders will drown out strategic messaging and, at worst, exclude it altogether.
Doing less for this audience actually means doing better.
Many organizations broadcast the same message to every audience to avoid leaving anyone out, even if that “anyone” is unknown. The result is messaging that is safe, broad, and easily ignored.
Citizens, elected officials, major employers, prospective investors, and members do not share the same motivations, needs, or stakes. Sending them all the same communications feels like productivity, but it undermines impact.
To advance your mission and influence your most critical stakeholders, you must communicate precisely to each audience. This requires audience segmentation.
At first glance, segmentation will seem like more work because it produces multiple versions of a message. But once audiences and their needs are defined, the amount of actual work becomes significantly less. When paired with #1 above, the net result is fewer messages and higher results.
Here's what that difference looks like:
It’s the same initiative but for vastly different audiences, adjusted to maintain relevance—and therefore influence.
Most organizations can articulate what they do and how they do it. But very few communicate why they do it—especially under the pressure of daily operations. Messaging inevitably defaults to events, programs, and activities because those are the tasks that fill the calendar. But operational updates do not motivate investors.
Investors want to understand:
When the "why" is clear, segmentation in #2 above becomes easy. You immediately know who needs the message and how to frame it in a way that resonates. It’s a practical safeguard against irrelevant communications to ask, “What am I asking this message to do, for whom, and why?”
If the same person who sends your event reminders, newsletter updates, and ribbon cutting announcements also sends your investor-critical communications, you've trained your audience to believe everything carries the same weight. This means nothing carries weight.
The person sending the message signals its importance—and relevance—before a single word is read. When major financial asks come from the same inbox as event logistics, you've already lost the battle for attention. In smaller organizations where few staff wear many hats, the trick is to make high-stakes messages feel distinct enough to be noticeable.
Ideally, and for more sizeable teams, you would seek match the gravity of the message to the authority of the sender:
It’s more about the signal than hierarchy. Your CEO who sends three emails a year will have each one opened. Your communications manager who sends three emails a day will spike unsubscribes. The content might be identical, but the perceived importance isn't.
These four pitfalls are not secondary or tertiary problems for another day—they directly influence investor confidence, organizational relevance, and your ability to lead economic progress in your community. This is precisely why NCDS developed its Roadmap to Relevance and Revenue: to ensure your strategy, messaging, activities, and investor priorities are perfectly aligned before launching a capital campaign or entering another strategic planning cycle.
If your organization is approaching big moves such as these, consider NCDS’ Roadmap to strengthen alignment, clarity, and credibility. Contact us for a free consultation, or download the Roadmap brochure here.
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