The Homework Behind Good Communications
There's a particular kind of email that lands in a tourism board's inbox. A traveller's transfer ran two hours late, or a booking wasn't honoured, and now they want to know why “your board” let this happen. I saw versions of this complaint at both boards I worked for, Hoi An and Vietnam, and the honest answer was always some version of: we don't run the transfer company. We don't own the guesthouse. We built the brand these operators sit under, and that's it.
That's an uncomfortable thing to sit with as a comms professional. You spend months building a promise, that a destination is safe, sustainable, well-run, and then a single operator you have almost no leverage over breaks that promise in public. Replying felt less like crisis management and more like apologising for someone else's mess.
I think about that same dynamic now, working with tech initiatives, and it's structurally similar. An alliance doesn't build the softwares in its registry. It vets it, lists it, and lends its name to it. If one listed tool turns out to have a security flaw or a governance problem, the alliance absorbs the reputational cost.
This took me a while (and some AI help) to name properly: the risk isn't really reputational damage from bad press. It's borrowed legitimacy (these bots really do come up with some catchy terms). Any time an organisation puts its name behind things it doesn't fully control, whether that's a certified operator or a registered piece of software, it's making an implicit promise on someone else's behalf. And a promise made on someone else's behalf is only as strong as the vetting behind it.
Which is where storytelling runs out of road. Cue gasps, how dare I? Yet it’s true. You can write the most compelling sustainability narrative a destination has ever had, but it means nothing if the certification standard behind it is thin, or worse, unenforced. I learned this working with sustainability certifications, where the standard should have been built into training and criteria before it could be a communications story at all. Tell the story before the standard exists and you're just doing PR for a promise nobody's actually checking. Until somebody does.
In a perfect world, comms doesn't get to sit downstream of the standard, waiting to be handed a finished thing to describe. It has to be in the room while the standard is being written. Not because comms people should be setting technical criteria, we shouldn't, but because we're the ones who'll have to defend those criteria in public when something goes wrong. If you're not close enough to the vetting process to know its actual limits, you'll oversell it, and you'll find out where the gaps are when an angry message arrives in the board’s DM because a family of four is stranded on an island where they don’t speak the language.
This is where the job stops looking like “just a comms role” and starts pulling you toward the technical side of an organisation, because you can't credibly represent a threshold you don't understand. This has been one of the more useful shifts tech work has pushed me toward: more standards research. Research and a habit of asking early: what's the weakest thing currently sitting inside our brand, and have we stress-tested it before someone else does it for us?
It’s a terribly uncomfortable question to ask, but it's cheaper than the alternative. A destination or an alliance can usually survive one bad actor if it caught the problem first and can point to the process that caught it. It struggles to survive the same problem if the public finds it before the organisation does.
And I don't think this is a niche observation. Anywhere comms is asked to represent a system it didn't build, whether that's a place, a coalition, or a registry of tools, the same rule will hold. The story is only as strong as the standard behind it. That's not a writing problem, it's a research problem. Learn the standard, sit in, understand what you're vouching for, before you write a single word defending it.
