Before you share a message with anyone, you should consider three fundamental questions:

1. Why do you want to communicate with another person or persons?
2. What do you want them to do?
3. How might you move forward?

Once you’ve established the why, what and how of your communication, you can start to think about structure. This might sound a bit formulaic at first, but if you reflect upon some of the most influential messages you have received yourself, you will find that they do often fall nicely into these three categories.

Getting things in the right order is important too. Going headlong into a communication that starts with what you think the other person or group of people need to do is usually unhelpful and may be seen as pushy. So it’s important to begin with the ‘why’, rather than the ‘what’.

People will naturally want to understand the reason why you want to make a change or ask them to do something and will therefore want you to provide some context or background to the benefits of taking action.