Speaking events cancelled. Podiums mothballed. What’s next for leadership communications?

You can still keep your audiences inspired and connected — even when we’re physically distanced.

With face-to-face events of all sizes being cancelled indefinitely, speakers and speechwriters are starting to reconcile themselves to a hard truth: It’s going to be a long time before you speak to your next big audience (at least, one that’s gathered in one place).

But that doesn’t mean you can’t speak to them in the meantime. We’ll need to adopt a new mindset and change our expectations, but the need for leadership communications has never greater than it is right now.

So let’s talk about charting some of this new terrain — and begin equipping you with the right questions to ask so you can navigate it.

But my most important message is this: if you aren’t doing it already, start communicating. Your audience wants to hear from you, even now. Especially now. Amid all the handwashing advice and escalating public health orders, we’re all hungry for the hope and inspiration that great leaders can offer.

Keep the lights on.

(And if you’re too swamped right now with the demands of the crisis to do that? Good news: Finding help has never been easier. A lot of talented folks are suddenly finding themselves with empty dance cards and time on their hands.)

Here’s a starting point: three new rules for leadership communications

1. The era of the guaranteed audience is over (for now). You’ll have to build your own.

Speaking events — especially the ones organized by a third party — usually come with a guaranteed audience. Walk up to the mic, and there they are in front of you.

Most of the channels available to us now, though, have “Audience not included” on the box. Putting on a webinar? Doing a livestream? You and your team will need to do some real work to gather viewers and sell them on spending their time watching or listening to you. You may need to start budgeting for social ads just to reach them at all.

But you can also look for partners who may be happy to bring an audience along if they believe your content will be valuable to them. A guest post on a well-established blog, a joint webinar with a like-minded organization with a large following — these can all be ways of reaching an audience without building one yourself from scratch.

Recommendations:

• Double down on building your platform: the audience that sticks with you over time. Your networks of social media followers and your email lists are now crucial.
• Look for opportunities to reach other platforms. Consider approaches like guest posts on a well-established blog, op-ed pieces, guest appearances on podcasts, magazine articles, online conferences and earned media.
• Build partnerships to build audiences: Collaborate with complementary and like-minded organizations to create, for example, joint webinars that you promote together.

2. Start with your internal audience.

Most organizations understand this well. Of all your constituencies, stakeholders and audiences, it’s your internal audiences you need to connect with first. They need to know how the decisions you’re confronting and making now may affect them. And you need to hear from them what they’re experiencing, as well as what they’re hearing about you and your organization.

Open those channels of communication now, and keep them alive and healthy, and it’ll be a lot easier to keep in touch with the people your organization relies on the most — even if they’re spending most of their time in PJs right now.

Recommendations:

• Communicate early and often with your internal audience. Look to them as a key part of your strategy for reaching external audiences, too.
• You still have to build your internal audience. They may be more intrinsically interested in hearing from you than any other audience, but you’ll need to let them know how and when you’ll be communicating — and why it’ll be worth their attention.
• You have to work harder to listen. Your normal feedback channels probably aren’t working nearly as well as usual. You may need to find new ways to know what’s on the minds of your internal audiences, how your message is connecting with them and what they need to hear from you.

3. Lead with your strengths, then ease out of your comfort zone — one step at a time.

With the shift to digital channels in particular, many organizations and their leaders are taking their first big jump into video livestreaming (like Zoom), webinars and podcasts. And at least for now, expectations have adjusted. With so many people working from home, we’re getting used to seeing a little domesticity — and some rough technical edges.

All of which makes this a good time for experimentation, because audiences are going to be more forgiving than usual of the odd glitch or hiccup. What you can’t sacrifice, though, are clarity, confidence and message.

Recommendations:

• Use the channels you know and trust for your most important messages. It’s where you’ll be at your most confident, and where your audience is probably already used to hearing from you.
• Get comfortable with video right now. Seeing your face and hearing your voice go a long way toward reinforcing the emotional connection you need with your audience. But it takes time to get comfortable with not being able to see and hear them, and still being able to convey emotion and energy. Developing those skills is every bit as important as learning the technical ins and outs of whatever platform you use — which you also have to do!
• Keep your experiments small, and scale up from there. Don’t make your first foray onto Zoom a 200-person extravaganza. Start with short, low-profile experiments with smaller audiences (ideally trusted, forgiving ones) before you expand your horizons.

One last point: “All pandemic, all the time” won’t work for you. Putting your audience first will.

Yes, COVID-19 is weighing heavily on your audience’s minds right now. But unless it’s central to your mission and your relationship with them, they probably aren’t looking to you for disease-related information (and they’re overstocked with it as it is).

So by all means, acknowledge and reflect this unique and frightening time. Talk about the way life has changed in a way that resonates with your mission and their own experience. And if you want to avoid a misstep, a little research and social listening will do you a lot of good.

Just remember why your audience is connected to you in the first place. That’s still your focus. And whatever story you’re telling, it’s ultimately about your audience. They have to see themselves in it, and see the relevance and value of what you’re saying in their lives.

Some resources from the Leadership Communications Podcast

Here are short episodes on…

• what to do when your speaking event gets cancelled
• leadership communications in a crisis: planning and execution
• what works (and what doesn’t) when your presentation goes virtual
• leadership through content curation