Text, email, social, digital, mail, calls. Campaigns and organizations use these channels to find people, segment audiences, and put messages in front of them.

The harder part is getting someone to actually care about what they receive.

I don’t think people have stopped paying attention. I think we’re selective about what deserves our attention. Think about your own phone. How many texts do you delete after reading the first few words? How many emails sit unopened? How many ads do you scroll past without even registering who they were from?

I do it constantly. I can tell almost immediately when I’m just another person on a list. Putting my name in the first sentence doesn’t really change that.

If someone is constantly emailing or texting me with “urgent” messages, I start tuning them out. If everything is important, nothing really is.

What usually gets me to stop is something specifically relevant to me: good timing, a mutual connection, something related to my work or personal life, or evidence that the person understands why they’re reaching out. My reaction is, “OK, this person knows why they’re talking to me.”

So maybe the opportunity isn’t simply finding another way to reach someone. Maybe it’s getting better at what we say, who we say it to, when we say it, and how we deliver it. Getting someone to notice is only the beginning. What gives them a reason to respond or act?

Efficiency isn’t the objective

There is nothing wrong with scale or automation. They’re powerful tools. The problem starts when efficiency becomes the objective instead of the tool.

Imagine Jan. 1 rolls around and I decide I’m going to be incredibly efficient this year. I send every friend and family member a message that says, “Happy birthday this year!”

Done. Everyone reached. Nobody forgotten. I’ve checked the box for the entire year.

It would also be a terrible way to communicate.

The point of wishing someone a happy birthday isn’t to complete the task. It’s to let that person know I’m thinking about them. A generic message sent to everyone on Jan. 1 accomplishes the exact opposite. It makes something that should feel personal feel completely impersonal.

Now use the same technology differently. Know when everyone’s birthday is. Associate their name with the right message. Personalize it based on the relationship. Schedule it for the right day. Automate the entire thing behind the scenes if you want.

But simply automating “Happy birthday, Patrick!” every year isn’t much better. Eventually I’m going to know exactly what it is. What makes it meaningful is a joke, something we did together, asking about the family, or just writing it the way that person actually talks to me.

To me, using my name isn’t personalization. Making the message feel like it was actually intended for me is.

Suddenly, technology is doing more work, but the communication feels more human, not less.

And, hopefully, I get to keep my friends.

Automation and personalization aren’t opposites. Used properly, automation should make personal communication possible at a scale that otherwise wouldn’t be. Timing, context, and personal touches matter because the goal isn’t to check the box that something was sent. It’s to make it connect.

Persuasion is more than punctuation

There’s another part of this that I think gets overlooked.

When you read a text, you may hear a different tone than the sender intended. The sender can leave clues about how they intended it to sound, but punctuation can only take you so far.

An exclamation point can suggest excitement. An ellipsis can create a pause. Italics can add emphasis.

But persuasion is a lot more complicated than punctuation.

Take a simple sentence:

“I can’t believe you did that.”

Now say it five different ways.

It can sound angry, proud, sarcastic, impressed, or disappointed. You can say it laughing. You can say it quietly. You can pause before the last word. You can emphasize “believe,” “you,” or “that,” and each version changes the meaning.

The words never changed. The message did.

That’s how we actually communicate. Tone, pacing, emphasis, pauses, emotion, and personality carry meaning that the words alone don’t.

In a 2005 study, Justin Kruger and colleagues found that people overestimated how clearly they conveyed tone through email. In one experiment with college students, recipients distinguished sarcasm from seriousness more accurately in voice recordings than in email. The tone that seemed obvious to the sender wasn’t necessarily obvious to the recipient.

We recently put together a demo for a prospective client using one of the personalities they work with. I won’t get into who it was, but this particular person has a huge personality. Recognizable one-liners, sayings, mannerisms, and a way of speaking that is uniquely theirs.

We went through texts, emails, newsletters, and videos to understand how this person actually communicates. Not just the topics or words, but the personality behind them. Then we built a fundraising message around it and turned it into a voice note.

By the time I finished listening, I was ready to donate.

And I knew it was a demo.

The fundraising ask itself wasn’t revolutionary. What stood out to me was how it was delivered.

The personality was part of the persuasion.

The pause mattered. The emphasis mattered. The familiar sayings mattered.

Reading the same script probably would have told me what they wanted. Hearing it made me feel why they cared.

I honestly don’t remember the exact words. I remember how it made me feel.

Make the message worth consuming

We spend a lot of time measuring whether communication was delivered, opened, clicked, viewed, or converted. Those numbers matter, but they don’t necessarily explain why someone responded or what kept others from doing so.

The next opportunity may be less about adding another channel and more about making the communication itself worth consuming.

When I’m trying to reach someone, I don’t really think, “What’s the best communication channel?” I think about the person, my relationship with them, and what I’m trying to get them to do.

If I know someone and want a quick answer, I’ll text. If I need to explain something with more context, I’ll email. If it’s nuanced or I know five minutes on the phone will accomplish more than 10 emails, I’ll call.

I also adjust based on the person. There are people I know I can text and get an answer in two minutes, and others I know I need to call.

And if I’ve emailed someone four times without a response, my instinct usually isn’t to send another email. I’ll reconsider what I’m asking and how I’m reaching out.

The channel should serve the message, not the other way around.

Attention comes before persuasion

We talk a lot about persuasion in politics. Who can be persuaded? What message moves them? How frequently should we reach them? What gets them to act?

But all of that comes after something much more basic.

You have to earn their attention first. And once you have it, what you do with it matters.

Getting my attention is one thing. Getting me to respond, Google someone, click a link, or take a meeting is another. Usually there has to be enough relevance or curiosity that I want to know more. If I have to spend time figuring out why I should care, I’m probably moving on.

I’m also much more likely to act when the next step is obvious and easy.

Imagine getting an invitation to a neighborhood meeting about something you care about. “Contact us for details” leaves you with work to do. Give me the date, the place, what we’re discussing, and a way to RSVP, and I can decide whether I’m coming.

For me, it’s probably: get my attention, give me a reason to care, then make the next step simple.

The organizations that figure this out won’t necessarily be the ones that communicate the most. They’ll be the ones that get better at deciding when they have something worth saying, who should hear it, and how it should be delivered.

None of these channels are going away. They work, and they will continue to work. But we have spent decades optimizing one side of the communication equation: How do we reach more people, more often, for less money?

And we have gotten incredibly good at it.

We can send a text to a million people. Deliver an email in seconds. Target an ad to an incredibly specific audience. Drop mail into thousands of homes. Put a message in front of almost anyone, almost anywhere.

But somewhere along the way, reach became the goal. And reaching someone isn’t the same thing as communicating with them.

What makes the room work

At a recent event for a statewide race, I asked the candidate and chief of staff a pretty simple question: What are you actually trying to accomplish tonight?

The answer wasn’t “get 500 people into a room.”

They wanted people to understand who the candidate was. They wanted to tell their story, convey their passion, explain what they believed, build trust, get people excited, and, ultimately, give them a reason to get involved and help fund the campaign.

My response was basically: Great. Now let’s bottle that and do it across the entire state.

Because what makes that room effective isn’t the room. It’s the communication happening inside it.

It’s hearing someone’s voice. Listening to their story. Picking up on their excitement, conviction, humor, and personality. It’s having the ability to ask a question and actually get an answer. It’s feeling like someone is talking to you, not simply broadcasting another message in your general direction.

That’s what starts to build a relationship. Relationships build trust. And trust makes every future ask more meaningful.

This is something I think about a lot: We spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what we’re going to say and surprisingly little time thinking about how someone is going to experience it.

Those are not the same thing.

A sentence in an email or text can carry the information, but it can’t always carry the intent. Voice can carry more of it.

The exact same words can sound excited, concerned, funny, serious, grateful, urgent, or deeply personal depending on how they’re spoken. Tone matters. Timing matters. Emotion matters. Emphasis matters. How a message is delivered can be every bit as important as what is being said.

Think about the stories you actually remember. They’re rarely a perfectly formatted paragraph somebody emailed you. You remember how someone told you something. You remember the punchline. The pause. The excitement in their voice. The part they emphasized because it actually mattered to them.

Stories are meant to be heard.

And in a world where everyone is competing for the same few seconds of attention, being recognizable and memorable matters a lot more than simply being present.

The missing half of communication

We’ve already gotten very good at the outbound side of mass communication. We know how to broadcast.

The outbound side of modern communication is incredibly sophisticated. We know who received something. Who opened it. Who clicked. Who donated. Who signed up. Who converted. We can segment audiences, test creative, optimize timing, and send enormous amounts of communication almost instantly.

But what happens when someone actually has something to say back?

That side is still remarkably fragmented.

Replies live in different inboxes. Calls go somewhere else. Survey data sits on another platform. Staff members hear things at events. Social comments live on another feed. Constituent issues end up in another system entirely.

We’ve built incredible infrastructure around speaking at scale, while the infrastructure for listening at scale has lagged behind.

That imbalance makes sense. Sending can be standardized, automated and measured. Listening is messier. Responses are unstructured, spread across channels, and often require judgment to interpret. For a long time, that made the inbound side much harder to organize at scale.

And when we’re talking about representation, that matters.

Representation is inherently a two-way system. Giving updates, explaining positions, raising money, and winning votes are obviously important. But they shouldn’t overshadow the other half of the equation: understanding what people are saying, what they care about, what they’re confused about, what they’re frustrated by, and what they actually want to hear about next.

Listening does not mean treating every response as a mandate or assuming the people who reply are representative of everyone an organization serves. It means having a reliable way to hear what people are saying, preserve what was learned, and let that understanding inform judgment.

What are people telling us?

For a long time, communication has mostly started with: What does the candidate or organization want to say?

I think the next era starts with another question: What are people telling us?

That’s where this starts getting really interesting.

Imagine communicating with 100,000 people and not simply measuring opens and clicks, but actually understanding the conversation that comes back.

What questions are people asking? What issues keep coming up? What are people responding positively to? Where is there confusion? What stories are resonating? What does one community care about that another doesn’t?

Now take all of that inbound communication, organize it, understand it, and let what you’re hearing influence what happens next.

Suddenly, we’re no longer just broadcasting. We’re learning.

And the next message doesn’t have to be the same generic message sent to everyone. It can reflect what someone cares about, what they’ve asked before, and where the relationship already stands.

That’s when communication at scale starts to look less like a sequence of sends and more like a continuing relationship.

The relationship before the ask

There’s another side of this that I think gets overlooked. We ask people for things constantly.

Donate. Vote. Sign up. Attend. Share. Volunteer. Take action.

But an ask without context or a relationship behind it is just another notification.

Imagine someone you haven’t heard from in six months suddenly texting you asking for $50. Now imagine someone who has spent the past six months telling you what they’re working on, explaining why it matters, sharing stories from the road, asking what you think, and responding to your questions.

Then they ask for $50.

Same ask. Completely different context.

The difference is everything that happened before it.

Technology has made it incredibly easy to optimize the ask. I think the much bigger opportunity is to optimize the relationship that comes before the ask.

Voice is one example of what richer communication can look like at scale. It can carry tone, personality, and context that text often cannot. But the larger opportunity is not any one channel. It is building communication systems that can speak, listen, remember, and learn.

Technology can help make that possible at a scale that wasn’t practical before. The point isn’t to automate the relationship. It’s to give organizations a better ability to sustain one.

We don’t need another way to blast another message into the noise. We need better ways to capture attention, tell stories, listen, learn, and build relationships.

Because the future of communication shouldn’t just be about reaching more people.

It should be about actually hearing them.