Beyond Storytelling: What Strategic Communication Really Means
By the time a press release is published, the real work of communication is already done — or already compromised. It is a truth few organizations are willing to accept: they continue to measure communication by what it broadcasts, when its true value is determined much earlier, in meeting rooms where lawyers, scientists, and communities do not yet speak the same language. After supporting some of West Africa's most sensitive environmental litigation, I have come to one firm conviction: the first message of any campaign is never the one the public sees. And organizations that ignore this are leaving their reputation to chance.
Communication begins before the first message
A few days before an international briefing on an environmental litigation case, everything still seemed quiet. No press release had been issued, no journalist had asked a single question, and as far as the general public was concerned, the case simply did not exist.
Yet the teams had already been at work for weeks. The lawyers were vetting which information could be made public without jeopardizing the proceedings. The scientists were verifying the data that would underpin the messaging. Community representatives were being prepared for interviews. Journalists were confirming their attendance at the briefing. At that point, communication was already well underway — even though not a single piece of content had been released.
That experience changed the way I see my profession. For a long time, I believed, as many do, that communication was essentially about telling the story of what had been done.
Today, I am convinced its role is something else entirely: it is about supporting the decisions that will allow a project to be understood, backed, and sometimes even accepted.
The press release is almost never the real work
When I look back at the campaigns I have been part of in recent years — preparing the communication around the scientific report on Simandou, coordinating the international briefing for the Aggah case, or supporting the announcements tied to the Koidu and Niafrang proceedings — I realize that the press release ultimately represented only a very small fraction of the work.
The hardest part lay elsewhere. It meant making sense of complex judicial proceedings, working with scientists to eliminate any imprecision, consulting with lawyers to protect the legal strategy, and preparing spokespeople who, in some cases, had never spoken to international media before. Before the first line of a press release was ever written, much of the strategy had already been defined.
This is probably what separates strategic communication from broadcast communication. The former seeks to answer the right questions before producing the right content.
The best messages are rarely born in front of a computer
Our profession is often associated with writing or social media. Yet the most decisive moments rarely happen in front of a screen. They happen around a meeting table, where everyone brings a different reading of the same issue. The scientist talks about methodology, the lawyer about procedure, the program manager about implementation, and the community about its daily life. Everyone is right — but no one is telling quite the same story.
The communicator's role, then, is to build a common language. Not to oversimplify things, but to help everyone understand why they matter. It is this step that later makes a coherent press conference, interview, or digital campaign possible.
What if communication were, above all, a strategic discipline?
These experiences have gradually led me to think about communication differently. Producing content still matters, but it is no longer enough. Organizations today need communicators who can anticipate risks, navigate complex environments, advise teams before decisions are made, and build narratives that can withstand a journalist's questions as well as those of an affected community.
In the end, the first message of a campaign is never the one that gets published. The first message is the one built internally, when all the stakeholders begin to speak the same language. That is the moment communication becomes truly strategic.