V.
What Happened When Two Intelligent University Students Were Asked to Build the Public Communication of a Small Heritage Organization?
If the previous chapter taught me how to become a better project manager, this chapter forced me to rethink something even more fundamental.
Communication.
Why is public communication so extraordinarily difficult for small educational and cultural organizations?
The educational content was highly specialized. The video production required technical skills. Those challenges were expected. Communication, however, seemed comparatively straightforward.
The project already existed. Its objectives were clear. The educational value was obvious. Surely, the difficult part would be creating the materials—not explaining them.
I could not have been more mistaken.
Two Excellent Students
Our two Social Media Community Managers—Malaak and Margarita—were intelligent, motivated, and genuinely committed to their work. When working on different aspects of public communication, their assignments were complementary rather than identical. One focused primarily on outreach, contact databases, and audience development; the other concentrated on social media, branding, and visual communication, and another set of contact databases. Together, they became responsible for building the organization's public presence from the ground up.
Yet, despite their individual strengths, I encountered the same question repeatedly. How do you communicate the value of something that very few people have ever heard about?
The greatest challenge turned out to be something entirely different than managing large amounts of work: translating a specialized cultural practice into meaningful public communication.
Both students were intelligent, motivated, reliable, and genuinely willing to learn. They accepted feedback professionally, invested significant effort into revisions, and demonstrated noticeable improvement throughout the placement. What neither of us anticipated, however, was how much of the placement would become an educational rather than a production process.
Subject knowledge matters in communication
One of the first discoveries was that effective communication in the heritage sector depends on subject knowledge just as much as communication skills. Book arts, design, historical craftsmanship, rare books, and cultural heritage cannot be presented effectively through generic marketing language. Early drafts often described services in broad, interchangeable terms that could have belonged to almost any organization. The challenge was not writing grammatically correct text; it was learning to identify what made each object, project, or process historically and artistically significant. Communication became an act of interpretation rather than promotion.
Building an Audience Before the Project Exists
Large organizations usually communicate with audiences that already know they exist. Museums have visitors. Universities have students. Libraries have patrons. Established organizations already possess communities.
A small nonprofit has none of these advantages.
Every follower.
Every subscriber.
Every newsletter reader.
Every workshop participant.
Every website visitor.
Every conversation...
...has to begin from zero.
This completely changes the nature of communication.
The purpose is no longer simply announcing activities.
The first challenge is convincing people that the organization itself deserves a place in their attention.
I realised very quickly that asking someone to become interested in rare books, historical collections, educational theory, bookmaking, or interdisciplinary visual thinking is rather different from promoting products that people already know they want.
Educational communication is, in many ways, educational before it becomes promotional. One cannot simply advertise. One must first explain why the subject matters.
Much of the outreach work therefore became something that rarely appears in job descriptions. Not simply producing posts. Designing how an organization should speak.
Malaak and Margarita devoted considerable effort to developing visual templates, adapting website materials for social media, creating graphic consistency across platforms, and helping establish an identity that could eventually become recognizable.
Design is not software – mentoring takes longer than assigning.
A similar realization emerged in visual design. Both students were comfortable using contemporary design software and social media platforms, yet this technical familiarity did not automatically translate into editorial judgment. Much of today's visual culture emphasizes speed, novelty, visual stimulation, and immediate attention.
It quickly became clear that professional communication is not produced by software but by judgment. The most important decisions were rarely technical. They involved choosing the appropriate visual language. These choices required continuous discussion because they reflected ways of thinking rather than procedures that could simply be memorized.
To my surprise, many principles that I had long considered self-evident had never actually been taught. Why should typography remain secondary to historical images rather than compete with them? Why should an image illustrate the specific idea being discussed instead of simply decorating a page? Why should music reinforce the historical atmosphere of a project rather than introduce an unrelated emotional narrative? Why are generous margins, restrained typography, and negative space not signs of emptiness but essential elements of visual composition?
Throughout much of the placement, many decisions required managerial review that would normally be expected at a more independent level (such as typography selection, layout decisions, image-text pairing, profile descriptions). The roles required continuous feedback before materials reached a publishable standard.
Early drafts relied heavily on generic marketing language and broad promotional statements. Although progress was gradual, the quality of later drafts showed noticeable improvement compared to the first weeks, particularly after rounds of structured feedback.
Teaching these principles became one of the largest components of the placement. Together we developed a visual brand guide, established typographic standards, discussed editorial composition, and analyzed examples from museum publications, exhibition catalogues, and art books. The objective was never to impose personal taste but to understand that every field develops its own visual language, and that effective communication begins by recognizing that language.
The Invisible Product
Another lesson gradually became apparent. Marketing usually assumes that the product already exists. Our situation was the reverse. While the outreach team was building communication materials, the educational program itself was still being written. The website of the school was still evolving. The visual identity was still developing. The videos were still being edited.
Sometimes promotional materials had to be redesigned because the educational content itself had changed only a day earlier. It felt slightly like trying to advertise a theatre performance while the script was still being rewritten backstage.
This was the reason why, in the middle of the CSJ program, I asked the outreach team to focus heavily on research, outreach databases, identifying organizations and individuals who might eventually become interested in the educational initiatives, and preparing communication materials for future campaigns. Nobody had done anything incorrectly. The project itself was simply evolving at extraordinary speed.
Neither role consisted merely of "posting on social media."
Both participants were gradually helping construct something much larger.
An infrastructure for communication.
An audience that did not yet exist.
A public identity that would hopefully continue developing long after the summer employment program had ended.
Communication itself required redesign.
The placement also changed my own understanding of project management. Initially, communication relied heavily on instant WhatsApp messaging. Individually, every question seemed reasonable; collectively, they created a continuous stream of interruptions that gradually transformed the project manager into a full-time support desk. As the only person simultaneously responsible for project planning, content development, supervision, and administrative management, I found that my most valuable resource was not funding or technology but uninterrupted time to think and create.
This led to one of the most important workflow changes of the entire program at the end of the second week. Rather than reducing communication, we restructured it. Questions were grouped and reviewed during scheduled discussions. This simple procedural change protected focused work while preserving open communication, and it encouraged greater independence in problem-solving. It also demonstrated that effective management is often less about increasing communication than about improving its structure.
Small organizations require unusually broad skill sets
Perhaps the most significant lesson was realizing how broad the role of an outreach assistant becomes within a small nonprofit organization. Unlike highly specialized positions in larger institutions, the placement required learning many unfamiliar topics simultaneously, including branding, visual identity, audience development, heritage communication, book arts, editorial design, typography, workflow organization, and multi-platform social media management. The breadth of the role required constant movement between creative, technical, organizational, and analytical thinking.
What I Learned
Looking back, I no longer see these placements simply as outreach positions. They became collaborative learning environments in which both the students and I were continuously adapting our expectations. They left with stronger practical skills in communication and design, while I gained a much deeper appreciation of the amount of tacit professional knowledge that experienced practitioners carry without realizing it. The placement reminded me that many standards we consider “obvious” are not obvious at all until someone takes the time to explain not only what should be done, but why.
I had always viewed communication as the final stage of a project.
Create something valuable. Then tell people about it.
This summer taught me something quite different.
Communication begins much earlier, while the project is still being imagined.
Every decision influences how the initiative will later be understood.
Every presentation shapes future expectations.
Communication quietly accompanies every chapter from the very beginning.
I realised that I had been thinking about it backwards all along.
