The false expectations of public communication

The first expectation is the hardest to renegotiate, because it is the one the client is paying for. Communication is asked to move variables it does not govern: enrolment, rankings, competitive funding.

Between 2022 and 2024 we worked on three consecutive enrolment campaigns for the University of Siena. After each one, the client understandably wanted to know what impact our work had had on the growth in enrolment which, fortunately, there always was. The honest answer is that we do not know. We know the visits to the site, the enquiries from the contact form, the downloads of the course guide. We know how the digital audience moved in front of the campaign. We do not know who enrolled because of the campaign, and we have no way of knowing.

The reasons people enrol at a university mature slowly, inside the family and the school, and an advertising funnel does not see them. A literature decades old says as much: Bourdieu and Passeron already read the choice of university as a selection tied to the family's cultural capital, and the AlmaLaurea reports confirm it with recent data. And yet seasonal campaigns continue to be sold, and bought, as the lever that shifts the number of enrolments.

A campaign, in our view, can do a good many useful things. It states the university's identity, occupies a space in the media, builds anticipation in the generation approaching the choice, prepares the ground for the moment when a seventeen-year-old opens the university's site and spends a long time there working out the teaching offer. The trouble, if anything, starts when you sell it as the lever for a strategic objective, when a campaign ought to be a way of holding public presence that defends long-term attractiveness.

The communication of a knowledge institution is often asked to be popular, that is, to work on big numbers, on trending topics, to be picked up by the national papers. Expectations of this kind come out of corporate marketing, where popularity serves to sell mass products to a mass market.

Transferred to a university or a research foundation, the model simply fails, because their work almost always addresses precise audiences, with different languages and different reading habits, so that a general-public metric misses the target.

The popularity trap burns the client's budget on audiences that have no relation to its function and weakens the institution's voice with the right audiences, because it forces it into a register those audiences do not recognise as their own.

Universities that have taken the route of academic influencers have gained immediate visibility from it, often at the price of internal distrust.

The third expectation is the youngest, and for that reason the least protected by cultural antibodies. The communication of a public institution is asked to be sincere. The word has been circulating in briefs for ten years, imported from a corporate culture that has put authenticity among its positioning values. Show what goes on behind the scenes, let researchers speak in the first person, hide nothing.

Underneath there is a misunderstanding. An institution's communication is not a person. It is a constructed apparatus, serving a client, which selects and decides what to say and what to leave unsaid according to rules the public does not see. Asking it to be sincere means asking it to be what it is not. The result is a staged sincerity: student testimonials collected by the press officer, laboratory videos in which researchers perform spontaneity in front of a camera that gave them three days' notice.

Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, distinguishes the stage where the presentation takes place from the back region where it is prepared. The sincerity trap asks you to bring the back region onto the stage. The moment you do, you build a new stage dressed up as a back region. Sooner or later the public recognises it, and trust betrayed by a sincerity that turns out to be constructed is harder to repair than trust in communication that declares itself institutional.

There is also an ethics of the work. Sincere communication tends to instrumentalise the people taking part in it: the researcher performing spontaneity, the student lending their story, the patient signing a testimonial. A communication that says what it is interpellates them as sources and witnesses, without obliging them to play themselves.

The way out is a stricter notion: the honesty of the apparatus. Communication is honest when it declares its own nature: who is speaking, on whose behalf, with what interest, within what limits. It is not a notion that sells well, but it is a notion that, in our view, lasts.

The fourth expectation is the most structural. It is the idea that communication is an office, a box you open and close when needed. The institution first does something, research, teaching, knowledge exchange, and then communicates what it has done, through an apparatus separate from the work, with different people and different metrics.

It is convenient administratively, because it produces clean organisation charts and identifiable people in charge. And it is false as a description. The communication of a knowledge institution is a dimension of its work, not one of its offices. A partnership that lets itself be badly described in its first six months will not have the same trajectory as one that described itself well. A foundation that publishes its studies as PDFs on its website and one that publishes them inside an edited magazine build, over time, two different communities of readers. Communication does not report the work. It extends it, makes it possible, or blocks it.

Where it has worked best, communication has sat at the table where strategic decisions are made, not at the table where they are executed. The model that has given us most is the work with the Rector's delegates for communication, at Siena and at La Stranieri. People who sit in the governance of the university and have communication within their remit. Talking with them does not mean talking about campaigns. It means talking about how the university thinks of itself. The campaign comes out of that conversation, and it has a different quality.

The opposite model is the internal office that receives an instruction to run a campaign and contracts it out to an external supplier. It produces ninety per cent of the university campaigns that anyone following the sector recognises as interchangeable. Not because the people who made them did not know the craft. Because the strategic conversation did not happen. There was a brief, and the brief was answered.

GRINS, the national recovery plan partnership on economic sustainability, shows the same thing in reverse. Over the past year we followed a policy brief on sustainable finance, conceived as a technical document for regulators. In a meeting with the spoke's researchers it emerged that it had a second audience, institutional investors, provided it was rewritten in another register. The decision to produce two versions was born there. It would not have been born if communication had been a separate function: an agency that receives the finished PDF has no way of intervening while the document is being written.

Continuous presence is not right for everything. It works where the institution has a long life ahead of it and a person, on the other side of the table, who takes on a conversation that lasts. For short commissions and seasonal deadlines, the external supplier remains the obligatory route. The point is to recognise continuous presence as the preferable option where conditions allow, and to stop treating it as a luxury.

We open this section of the magazine on Dinamo's new site with this piece because much of what we intend to say in future rests on the distinction between what public communication, broadly understood, manages to do and what it does not.

Knowledge institutions work inside a cloud of implicit expectations, and in this article we take on four of them, the ones we have met most often.