"The community must recognise that our success as a water utility is their success as a community"

We’ve diversified our tools and methods to capture our community’s attention and meet our customers where they are. We’re emphasising values-based messaging, speaking to the heart from the heart.

And we’re bringing people in and elevating them, making our community members partners in our work and our success. Slowly but surely, we’re shifting from “You pay the bill, we’ll take care of the rest!” to expressing gratitude to the public for joining the good fight:

• Water is worth it.
• Your investment matters.
• Together, we’re protecting a precious resource and the critical systems that will serve you and your family for generations to come.

Why do you think it is important to communicate about water?

We need our community’s support and advocacy for long-term investments that ensure the longevity of our system and the protection of our limited resources

Is there anything more crucial than water? Clean, safe drinking water is the foundation of a healthy community, but the work and infrastructure often go unnoticed—until there’s a disruption.

We need our community’s support and advocacy for long-term investments that ensure the longevity of our system and the protection of our limited resources.

To build that support, it’s critical that the community recognises that our success as a water utility is their success as a community. Reliable access to clean, safe water—or “that sweet, sweet life juice” as our stellar communications team is fond of calling it—is fundamental to our city’s livability, its economy, and its future.

We also have moral, ethical, and legal obligations to ensure that everyone in our community can access essential information about their drinking water. We must develop content and communication strategies that meet the needs of people with varying levels of income, education and English proficiency, differing abilities and generational experiences.  To be effective, communications efforts require a lot of forethought and a decent budget. 

What are the most challenging aspects of communicating water-related news?

We’ve all experienced the break-neck pace of change in communications, so I’ll cut to the chase. Today, our customers choose how they want to get their information and it’s on us to break through the static and capture a sliver of their time for water.

Here are some realities:

• We’re in constant competition for mere snippets of attention from the people responsible for funding our projects.
• We live in an increasingly polarized society that distrusts government.
• Rising costs are here to stay.
• Effective communication can be expensive.

The only way to guarantee that you can get someone’s attention these days is to pay for it through multimedia advertising, digital engagement and mailing and robust staffing of communications professionals. (Caveat: There are no guarantees!)

Which brings us to what might be the biggest challenge: Convincing the people who hold the public purse strings (the councilors, the administrators) to approve spending on communications campaigns – something that’s still a very new concept for many in the public utility world.