A Lesson from Personal Injury Lawyers - Understand the WHEN of Communications

Let me first start out by stating that I don't condone many of the tactics of ambulance chasing personal injury lawyers... However, I do believe there is a lesson to be learned from them - getting your message in front of the right people at the right time is imperative...

I really hadn't thought much about this before my wife was recently in her second car accident within a month. She was recently rear-ended in her car, the police were called, and a report was made. (Don't worry, she's fine.)

What happened next was interesting... About three days later, she received two packages in the mail from personal injury lawyers saying essentially "we noticed that you were recently in a car accident in which you may or may not have been injured... Now is the time if you have been injured to get a personal injury lawyer."

I think the lesson here is that while chasing ambulances is not the way I would want to make my living, the fact is that had my wife been injured, having that message there at the time that it arrived would have been beneficial. They know their audience (injured people), know the right way to reach out to them (in the mail), and know the timing when it would be beneficial for their audience to have received the message (immediately after the accident.)

Our organizations should have similar planning and understanding of the "when" our messages are most relevant to our audiences. We do it with membership reminders, but do we do it well enough with our other communication pieces?

Take a lesson from the ambulance chasers out there - getting your message in front of the right audience at the right time is important. Who knows what might happen - you get a new member, a new volunteer or a new advocate because you were on the ball.