Crossover Technical Communication Work
All the skills you possess as a professional technical communicator are readily transferable to related audiences in your clients’ organization, particularly your…
- Editorial Expertise
- Organizational Expertise
- Educational Expertise
Editorial Expertise
There are all kinds of audiences in your clients’ organization who can benefit from your editorial skills. Try product management, sales, human resources. Try the president!
These people are not trained writers. What’s more, they probably hate writing. Chances are they’ll jump at any opportunity to improve their communication output without actually improving their personal communication skills.
Organizational Expertise
Editing the output of non–writers is hard work—not only because many of these authors cannot construct a readable sentence, but often because they cannot string thoughts together in a logical fashion to achieve a specific goal.
Editing is a lot easier on the back end if you can control document organization on the front end:
- Help authors outline their thoughts at the very beginning of a writing project, set them loose writing, and then polish up their work for final delivery.
- Design and create document templates to standardize (and improve) the look and feel of client deliverables.
- Create boilerplate text that authors can mix and match as needed for frequent client deliverable types like sales proposals.
Educational Expertise
I bet you think I plan to discuss training deliverables here. Gotcha! This is the section on marketing deliverables. And your first response is probably “Oh no—I can’t write smoke and mirrors glitz.”
Well, neither can I. Nevertheless, I’ve made quite a niche for myself designing and creating technical marketing literature. That’s because I realized the following a long time ago:
- It’s a technical communicator’s job to educate an audience.
- It’s a marketer’s job to persuade an audience.
- Guess what: You can persuade an audience by educating them!
Once you understand and accept this simple fact, there’s a whole host of fun and exciting deliverables to which you can apply your technical communication abilities, such as:
- Brochures
- Product bulletins
- Product descriptions
- Product demonstrations
- Prospect presentations
- RFP responses
- Scripts
- Customer newsletters
- Magazine articles
An Added Bonus
Once you've produced a few technical marketing deliverables and understand the mindset required to educate/persuade rather than just educate, you'll discover that you produce better training- and user-focused deliverables—because you've started to deliver communication the way your audience thinks instead of the way a product is organized.
One Word of Warning
There are more people in your clients' organization with a vested interest in the look, feel, and content of a marketing-focused deliverable than a system-, user-, or training-focused deliverable. Don't shoot yourself in the foot.
- Think in terms of phased design and creation—perhaps an outline, then a basic prototype, then a full–blown prototype, then a first draft, and so on.
- Get buy–in from all interested parties for each phase—that way the president can't turn to you when the deliverable returns from the printshop and say “That’s not what I wanted!” (Unfortunately, I know whereof I speak. I learned this important lesson the hard way.)
A Final Word …
…before we leave the subject of educational expertise: It’s also transferable to other client departments in the form of:
- Company reports
- Employee newsletters
- Employee policies and procedures
- Employee productivity tools