Sometimes, Just Make the Flyer. Finding the middle ground between responsive service and strategic communications
“I put in the request. Why can’t you just make what I asked for?”
If you work in communications, you’ve probably heard some version of that question.
And honestly? Sometimes it’s a fair one.
Communications is a service function. People come to us because they need something, and part of our job is to make that process easy and responsive. Not every flyer needs a strategy session. Not every request needs ten follow-up questions.
Sometimes the audience is clear, the purpose makes sense, we have what we need, and the best thing we can do is get to work.
But communications is also a strategic function.
Our job isn’t only to produce what was requested. It’s to think about whether it will work.
The challenge is finding the middle ground: being responsive without becoming purely transactional, and being strategic without making simple things unnecessarily complicated.
For me, the answer is something I’ve started thinking of as proportional strategy.
Strategy Should Match the Need
At its simplest, we need to understand three things:
Who are we trying to reach?
What do we need them to know or do?
Is what we’re creating a reasonable way to accomplish that?
If those answers are clear, great. Make the flyer.
If they aren’t, we need to ask some questions.
And if something truly urgent happens, we may need to answer those questions in five minutes instead of five days.
Strategy doesn’t disappear. We compress it.
The amount of strategy should be proportional to the situation. The commitment to thinking strategically shouldn’t be.
There’s Urgent, and Then There’s Urgent
If an operational situation is affecting patient care, that’s not the moment to point to a service agreement and talk about standard turnaround times. We reprioritize and move.
But there’s a difference between something that is urgent and something that became urgent.
A speaker series we’ve known about for a month is different. If the goal is to generate registrations and build excitement, more runway gives us more options. Maybe the answer is a flyer. Maybe it’s a flyer supported by email, digital promotion, reminders or other channels.
The same goes for an annual holiday drive. We know it’s coming.
That doesn’t mean someone intentionally waited until the last minute. We’re all busy. Things happen. A good communications team should have enough flexibility to help when they do.
But when every request requires an exception, the exception starts becoming the process.
I’ve Had to Learn This, Too
I work well under pressure. Give me a complicated situation and not quite enough time, and I tend to find another gear.
But I’ve learned something important as a leader: my comfort with urgency doesn’t mean my team should have to work that way all the time.
In trying to be responsive—to be the team that says yes and figures it out—I’ve sometimes passed that urgency downstream to my staff.
Do that often enough and responsiveness becomes exhaustion.
So now, when a rush request comes in, I’m trying to ask something different.
Not simply: Can we do it?
Because we probably can.
Instead: What happens if we do?
What moves? What gets delayed? Does the scope change? Are we asking someone to abandon planned work? Is this important enough to justify that tradeoff?
Sometimes the answer is absolutely yes. Other times it might be: “We can do this quickly, but here’s what will need to move.”
That’s not saying no. It’s making the tradeoff visible.
Our clients shouldn’t have to understand every detail of our workload before asking us for help. But our staff shouldn’t have to absorb every organizational urgency simply because they’re committed to being helpful.
Being responsive matters. So does building a team that can keep being responsive tomorrow.
Your Flyer Isn’t Our Only Flyer
A requester is understandably focused on their event, program or audience. Communications has a different vantage point.
Our team supports multiple departments and external clients. We’re thinking about publications already scheduled, campaigns underway, competing deadlines and audiences receiving multiple messages.
Your flyer may make perfect sense on Tuesday. But if three other communications are reaching the same audience on Tuesday, Wednesday might be better for everyone.
Maybe your flyer should be supported by another channel. Or maybe we’ve considered everything else happening and concluded: Nope. Tuesday is perfect. Make the flyer.
Strategy doesn’t always mean changing the answer. Sometimes it means knowing the original answer was right.
When Everyone Can Create
It’s easier than ever for people across an organization to create their own communications materials. That can be a good thing. Creative tools are more accessible, templates are better, and sometimes self-service makes perfect sense.
The challenge isn’t the tool. It’s what can get lost when the deliverable becomes disconnected from the larger communications picture.
Something can look fine on its own and still be off-brand. Messaging may not align with other organizational communications. Something may go out without the communications team even knowing it exists.
More importantly, what was approached as one flyer may have been more effective as part of a coordinated, multi-channel effort.
The ability to create something quickly is valuable. Knowing what to create, why we’re creating it, when it should go out, where it belongs and how it fits with everything else is a different skill set.
That’s strategy.
Maybe the Answer Is Both
I don’t want a communications operation where process becomes more important than service. I also don’t want one where good service means saying yes to every request exactly as it arrives, regardless of the impact on the work or the people doing it.
Neither extreme works.
Sometimes we should ask questions. Sometimes we should get out of the way and execute. Sometimes we should recommend something different. Sometimes we should make an exception. And sometimes something is important enough that everything else really should move.
Knowing the difference is part of the expertise.
Communications has responsibilities in this partnership, too. If we want people to involve us earlier, we have to demonstrate why doing so adds value. We need to understand the work, respect operational realities, make our processes easy to navigate and avoid adding process simply for the sake of process.
Being strategic doesn’t have to mean making things more complicated. Often, good strategy makes things simpler.
So, Yes. Sometimes Just Make the Flyer.
If the objective is clear, the audience is clear and the approach makes sense? Make it. Do it well. Do it on brand. Get it out the door.
If something genuinely important happens and people need information now? Stop everything. Let’s go.
And sometimes? Ask one more question.
Why are we making this?
Not because we want to slow things down. Because we want what we create to work.
The middle ground between service and strategy isn’t a perfect process or a rigid set of rules.
It’s judgment.
Knowing when to ask another question and when we already have enough answers. Knowing when a deadline should move—and when everything else should move because the deadline really is that important.
And recognizing that the people requesting the work and the people producing it ultimately want the same thing:
We want the communication to work.
Sometimes that requires strategy. Sometimes it requires speed. Most of the time, it requires a little bit of both.