- Avoid jokes that might hurt someone’s feelings. It creates an unsafe environment .
- Do not make people feel sorry for you or experience any other negative emotions.
- Remove everything that does not add new information to the post. When communicating initiatives our goal is to provide maximum information per minimum text.
- Use “we” and “together” as much as possible. Remove or rephrase everything that opposes you and the company against the community.
- Use simple language. The simpler the language you use, the more people will understand what you want to say.
- Be concise. The rule of thumb for communicating initiatives is that a post should be shorter than one and a half pages in Google Docs written in font size 11.
- Be focused. Communicate one idea at a time. If there are many different issues you want to discuss, it may be better to make a separate post for each one.
- Connect and unite. The goal in itself for any communication is to connect users to one another. We need to enable them to talk to each other.
- Have a clear call to action, when you ask for feedback or input from the community.
- Keep your initiative posts inclusive. Inclusive means that users have an opportunity to participate in the discussions you start, provide their feedback or share their thoughts. When users are included in the discussion about solving a problem, they consider the solution to be theirs and will be likely to help implement it, regardless of whether the solution chosen is yours, theirs, or some other user.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.