Every organisation wants to sound good. Whether it’s a council, a housing provider, a community organisation or a regional service team, the instinct to polish, to stylise, and to make things sound a bit more ‘professional’ is hard to resist. But the line between clarity and cleverness is easily crossed, and once you lose clarity, you risk losing your audience entirely.
In real life, people do not approach service information in the abstract. They visit a page because they need something, usually in a hurry, often on their phone, and quite possibly in a heightened emotional state. They may be frustrated, concerned, tired, or simply trying to get something done before they pick the kids up. If your message doesn’t meet them on their terms, it doesn’t matter how nicely it’s designed.
This is where a lot of public service communication quietly breaks. The message that gets published has usually passed through too many filters – a department’s perspective, a governance sign-off, a last-minute rewrite to make it sound friendlier – until it ends up with softened wording and a buried call to action. Sometimes the tone is too formal, other times it tries too hard to be upbeat. Either way, the point gets lost. The reader walks away none the wiser, or ends up calling to clarify something that could have been made obvious at the top of the page.
I’ve worked on messaging around some of these most sensitive areas. One project, which involved communicating a shift in responsibility for minor housing repairs, demanded absolute clarity. Tenants were being told that, moving forward, some types of repairs—previously handled by the landlord—would now be their responsibility. The policy was board-approved, the change was necessary, but the delivery could easily have triggered confusion or backlash. The real work wasn’t in designing a leaflet or styling a webpage. It was in finding the right wording: straightforward, calm, informative, and above all, transparent. The final version wasn’t catchy. But it was clear. And it worked.
Small changes often have the biggest effect. In another case, simply adjusting the label on a button within a customer portal had a measurable impact. By changing the wording to better reflect the user’s mental model of what they were trying to do, we saw more than a 30% increase in people choosing the digital option over phoning in. It wasn’t a technical fix. It wasn’t even a design overhaul. It was just better language, backed by insight. These sorts of improvements come out of ongoing observation and analysis—something I build into every project through my analytics and reporting work.
It’s not just about the language used in a single message either. Mismatched versions of the same information are still far too common. You’ll find one tone on a website, another in an email, and something entirely different printed on a poster or posted on social media. It’s not a branding issue. It’s a symptom of content being created in silos, with slightly different interpretations of who it’s for and what it’s supposed to do. When that happens, users are left to guess which version is the one to trust. Or they call to ask. Or they ignore it entirely.
The organisations that get it right are usually the ones that write with purpose. They don’t try to say everything at once. They don’t use seven paragraphs when three will do. And they don’t let internal jargon slip into public content. They start with what the user needs to know and go from there. They test what works, refine as needed, and prioritise clarity over tone. Not because they don’t care about their voice, but because they know their users care more about being understood.
This kind of approach doesn’t mean writing like a robot. It just means writing like someone who respects the reader’s time. I’ve seen it work in large housing groups, in local authorities, and in small community organisations with no formal comms team at all. It takes a bit of focus, a bit of humility, and a willingness to simplify. But it’s not difficult. It’s just about letting the message come first.
Clear doesn’t have to mean boring. But if it’s not clear, it probably isn’t working.
