A couple of years ago, I met (over Zoom) with a group of senior adults in Arizona who wanted to lobby their Homeowners Association (HOA) get a pickleball court built and some new members elected. They didn’t have a large marketing budget or a communications team. What they did have was a Facebook group, a clear message, and a willingness to ask for what they wanted in plain words.

They ended up getting the funding for their court, and the elections were a rousing success.

Around the same time, I was helping a different client untangle something that had nothing to do with marketing at all: their phone kept syncing photos to the wrong account, and nobody could figure out why. Two very different problems. Same root cause.

You see, the problem wasn’t the tool. It was the fog around it.

Whether we’re talking about community group messaging or a setting on someone’s phone, the thing that trips people up almost never the technology itself. It’s the fog that builds up around it, and the assumption that you need to already understand something before you’re allowed to ask about it.

Things can quickly become murky in meetings when someone nods along to a marketing plan full of phrases like “engagement funnel” and “brand voice pillars” without actually knowing what those mean for their organization. The murkiness and frustration also shows up when someone avoids updating their phone because they’re worried they’ll “break something,” even though the fix is three quick taps away.

In both cases, avoiding reality isn’t helping anyone. It’s just making people feel like they’re on the outside of something they have every right to understand.

What the pickleball court group got right

Here’s what I noticed about that Arizona group. They didn’t wait until their message was polished or hire a consultant to write their mission statement first. They posted honestly, in their own words, about what they wanted and why it mattered to their community. People understood it immediately, because there was nothing to decipher.

That’s the whole secret, really. Clarity isn’t a stylistic choice. It’s the thing that makes the message work. A social enterprise explaining its impact, a nonprofit recruiting volunteers, a grandmother figuring out why her photos won’t back up to the cloud — all three are solved the same way: strip out anything that requires “insiderness.”

The overlap

I work with nonprofits and social enterprises on their branding and multimedia choices. I also help everyday people who feel lost in using or afraid of their technology. On paper, those sound like very different businesses. In practice, they’re the same work wearing different clothes.

The nonprofit leader who calls me because her website copy sounds like it was written for a grant committee instead of a human being is dealing with the same disconnect as the retiree who calls me because his email keeps asking him things in words he doesn’t recognize. Both of them know exactly what they want. What’s missing is a translator. Someone willing to sit next to them and say, “here’s what that actually means, and here are your options.”

That’s the work. Never dumbing anything down, of course, just refusing to make people work harder than they need to in order to understand something that was supposed to help them in the first place.

Use this test on something you’ve written

If you want to check whether your own messaging has fallen into the murky fog, try this: read your website’s homepage, your last newsletter, or your volunteer sign-up page out loud to someone outside your organization who isn’t familiar with your world. If they have to stop and ask what something means, that’s a sign that your writing could use better clarity.

The same test works for tech. If a setting or a process needs a paragraph of caveats before someone can use it, the problem usually isn’t the user, but the explanation.

Small, honest, and understandable wins

The Arizona group didn’t need a rebrand to get their pickleball court. They needed a hand in getting their message out to plainly say what they meant to as many people as possible in their community. That’s true for every social enterprise, every nonprofit, and every person who’s ever felt embarrassed asking “wait, what does that button do?”

Clarity is the beginning and the foundation, and we have to avoid the urge to leave seeking clarity until the end of a project or message. Everything works better once that’s in place.

If you’re looking at your own materials, or your own settings, and feeling that fog settle in, those are the kinds of conversation I like having. No jargon, no judgment — just plain language and a plan that fits you right where you are.