Characteristics of an Effective Communication

What are the characteristics of a proposal, report or presentation to be effective? What distinguishes a communication that produces expected results of an inefficient communication?
This reflection is certainly important for anyone who writes proposals, reports and other communications, as it can help prepare documents with the highest quality and reach the objectives for which they were designed.


I. Usability
A document with high usability is a document that is easy to use by the reader:

• Perform a task or make a decision;
• Find the necessary information;
• Understand the information in the document accurately.

Usability is an essential feature of a document, people are exposed to excessive information - emails, memos, proposals, reports - and the time we have is insufficient to analyse all this information. The usability ensures that readers get the results they want document, spending the least possible time and with minimum errors.


II. Persuasion
A document with high persuasion is a document that is capable of influencing attitudes and actions of the readers.
A proposal is effective only if it is persuasive, i.e. it generates a favour response from the readers. Similarly, a report that defends an idea or point of view will only be effective if it is convincing and persuasive to readers. Persuasion is thus an essential feature for any document so that it gets the results for which it was created. The first challenge of persuasion in a document, or an email, proposal or report is to persuade the audience to read the document. With lack of time and information overload that people face today, the decision to read or not a document is often taken in less than one minute.


III. Efficiency
Create a report or proposal efficiently means to produce a document spending a minimal amount of time and the least amount of resources.
Normally the ones that write a report, proposal or other document, face often restrictions of time and other resources. For this reason, it is essential to use tools and work methods that allow the necessary tasks to be performed in the shortest possible time.


IV. Strategies for Achieving Usability and Persuasion
The following table presents some strategies to create documents with high usability and persuasion.

A) Think constantly in your readers
While you organize and develop your document always think of your readers:

• What do they know about the subject?
• What are their objectives?
• What are their attitudes?

B) Help your readers find information quickly
Develop a document easy to use and locate the information that readers need:

• Introduce the main topics at the beginning of document;
• Use titles, tables and bulleted lists to guide readers to information that they seek,
• Use a writing style easy to read.

 C) Highlight more persuasive aspects Highlight the most persuasive aspects of your document:

• Focus on objectives and values of audience
• Introduce the most persuasive aspects in beginning of the document.  

V. Strategies to Achieve Efficiency
The following table presents some strategies to create documents efficiently.

A) Automate tasks with Word (or similar tool)
Use the advanced features of Word to perform automatically the following tasks:

• Format of the headings and paragraphs;
• Paging of a document;
• Create an index;
• Organize a document.

B) Create Slide-show with Power Point (or similar tool)
Use Power Point for presentations to facilitate the following tasks of creation of slides:

• Select the look of slides;
• Format titles and texts;
• Insert images, sounds and videos.

C) Analyse the information with Excel (or similar tool)
Use the advanced tools of Excel to perform the following tasks on time:

• Analyse data lists;
• Conduct sensitivity analyses and scenarios;
• Perform operations with dates and text.

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