I think internal communications is about to have A Moment in higher ed.
Actually, I think it’s about to be the hero — or villain — of the entire 2020-21 school year.
I did a dumb drawing to illustrate why, up top.
We’re about to embark on the Most Online Semester of All Time. COVID’s made things weird; more than weird, it’s made them scary.
Scary for us in the institution — we have a duty to deliver the best education we can. That’s been called into question by this drive to (mostly) entirely online classes for at least the fall semester of the 20-21 school year; even the best of us (and the place I work is very, very good — best in Canada, if not North America) are anxious.
Students, though.
Fresh or recently outta high school, worried about the future, jobs, their actual grades, the fact that we’re melting the planet. We’re in a pandemic that if it had slightly more visually appalling symptoms would be a global horror movie. They’ve made the largest investment of their lives so far — some of them ever, if they don’t buy a house — in this whole higher education thing.
And we’re throwing a whole new playbook at them. Kids entering university for the first time, with preconceptions built on a lifetime of TV and movies and books about it, are off the map. We’re all off the map.
I actually feel pretty good about the coming semester. Where I’m at, anyway, the administration and the faculty have an appetite to improvise and excel. We’ve got a great senior admin team, dedicated faculty, and a top-notch digital teaching and learning team thanks to earlier online course development.
But how do you convey that?
Hence the sketch above. We need to instill confidence in the incoming students. So I’ve been thinking about confidence, and how it flows.
It doesn’t flow equally in all directions.
The ability to instill confidence isn’t equal. I think you can have a strong flow from the institution to faculty to students. Faculty, similarly, have the power to instill confidence in students.
But the transfer weakens on the inverse. Students can to an extent help faculty feel more confident — being attentive, participating, clearly demonstrating they’re learning. That’s got some value in confidence-building for faculty. The flow is weaker in the student -> faculty direction, though. It’s relatively easy for a confident teacher to build class confidence. It’s harder for students to rebuild a faculty member’s confidence.
Similarly, faculty can increase institutional confidence by radiating preparedness. But it’s more of a positive feedback loop than a process of confidence that starts with the faculty and makes the whole institution confident.
So internal comms is about to have A Moment. It’s a vehicle for both building and conveying confidence, from the institutional level to both the faculty and students.
You can have the best plan in the world for the fall, but if you’re not sharing it clearly, you’re not building confidence. You can have the world’s greatest digital lesson plan and all the tools in the world, but if you’re not showing students that’s on the way, you’re not building confidence.
And confidence starts at the institutional level. Students and faculty both need to know the institution has their backs.
There are very valid conventional-marketing approaches to this — make a public-facing campaign, target it at your students (geography, age, interests) and benefit from the reputational splash-out into adjacent audiences. And that’s a great idea. Do something excellent and big.
Big is general, though, and you need to back up the big and general with the specific. I can tell you it’s going to be great, and that’s a good thing to do, but without the undernarrative of what _exactly_ is making it great, that supernarrative risks collapse.
Which takes us back to internal comms, and faculty or department-level messaging.
Internal comms is about to have A Moment.
It has to.
Because if we’re not on point with our newsletter game and our student-facing web game and our app game and our outreach game, we’re not going to have students hitting the ground confident and eager for the Most Online Semester Ever.
Having to unpack and unravel anxiety after the start of term is doubling the load. Then we’re downloading a stack of not only teaching duties and student-management duties to our faculty and staff… we’re compressing a pile of anxiety into the mix as well.
I’m actually confident right now, because I’ve got the inside-baseball view of the preparation, innovation and energy that’s gone into this semester. Now it’s incumbent on me, in my job, to make sure I’m helping the institution tell stories that radiate that confidence to our faculty and students.
It’s going to be a good semester, despite (and in some ways because of) this pandemic. I’ve got the keys to make it even better. Internal communications, the tousle-headed little brother of marketing, is about to have its day in the sun. It’s not the area of marketing and communications that usually gets the glory.
What does it mean when every job you’ve ever had is the best job you’ve ever had?
Because that’s the deal. I think I’m just an incredibly fortunate dude.
In high school I had the usual slate of jobs — gas station, washing dishes at a restaurant, busboy, hardware clerk at Canadian Tire (if a teenager working at the Tire ever tells you he knows what he’s talking about, believe me he does not).
The first ‘real’ job, though — like actual responsibility, opening and closing, managing a float, dealing with customers solo — was at a used book / comic book / trading card shop called Twice Told Tales. The owner, Ron, was a great guy and pretty much the ideal boss for a 15- or 16-year-old. He was probably in his early thirties then, but was an adult to me, in that way everyone over 25 is “generic adult”. He had another store in Markham he spent a lot of time at, so I kind of semi-managed it after a year — buying books, taking stock, putting in orders, running inventory, managing the cash and the float. I loved books and comic books and in my last year there, Magic the Gathering cards. I discovered Richard Brautigan and alternative ‘comix’ there.
It was the best job I ever had.
Graduating from Ryerson and the Radio & Television Arts program, I somehow lucked into being the editor in chief of the school paper, the Eyeopener — one of only a handful of non-journalism grads to do it. I drank a lot of coffee and smoked cigarettes and had yelling fights with the news editors and the photo editors sometimes. We ran me for office in the provincial election in the Fort York riding as a publicity stunt (positioning ourselves as the Spider-Sense Revolution, in opposition to Mike Harris’ Common Sense Revolution, with a general mandate to do all-candidates meetings and talk about how education matters) and I got 140 votes, which wasn’t great but still beat the Natural Law party and the Marxist-Leninists. Production nights — this was in the era of pasteup, where we would lay out the paper on Macs but still had to print everything and paste it up on waxed board, making edits with blue pencils and cutting out and replacing individual words and letters with Xacto knives — would go on till about two in the morning, and a few of us would crash on the office couches to get up and deliver the paper at 5 a.m. the same day. We ate bad Chinese food and terrible pizza. When the stars aligned, we’d get ads from both the local Caribbean restaurant Mr. Jerk and for a sperm donor clinic which we would dutifully place next to each other on the back page of the paper. Mike, one of our news editors, once stole three bags of shredded papers from the Principal’s trash after a closed-door budget meeting and spent a whole night trying to tape them back together. Somebody sent us a Sega Saturn for the entertainment section and we stayed up all night playing Virtua Fighter. We launched a whole new section of the paper, championed and edited by Brian Daly, called Roots & Culture because even in 1995 it was sadly obvious that everything was too white and marginalized people needed voices. I worked with brilliant people who later became luminaries in journalism and graphic design — Ed Keenan, Doug Cudmore, Stefan Woronko.
It was the best job I ever had.
As my time at the Eyeopener was drawing to a close, I got a call from my friend Mark who told me that the radio station at the 2000-student English-language university he went to in Quebec — Bishop’s — had just gotten its FM license. But the CFRC said they had to have a full-time station manager and their total budget was around $14,000 a year so they needed somebody who would work for about the equivalent of $5 an hour to run a radio station. I leapt at the chance and they hired me. I was the only full-time employee of a station that at its peak was broadcasting in four languages, with over two hundred volunteers manning shows from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week. The volunteers were all dedicated and a bit crazy; some of them formed a record label later, which among other things was the first to sign Canadian indie rock darlings The Dears. We hosted cheap concerts for bands who just wanted a place to crash and a share of the door on runs from the East Coast to Montreal. I made spaghetti and meatballs for The Planet Smashers and Itch crashed on my sofa once. The station went from 25 watts to 500, broke from the student union and became an independent non-profit, and did some ridiculously innovative things in radio programming that I’m proud of today.
It was the best job I ever had.
After some time kicking around cleaning apartments and helping run a B&B, I was hired to be the editor for a truly brilliant guy who was doing French-to-English translation but needed an editor to turn his translated English back into “English English.” It was a great idea and one I generally don’t see many translators use. I started with him part-time, then full-time, and after a few years it was a standalone office and four full-time staff. We did tons of work for ad agencies, government work, tourism, all kinds of things. We translated a liquor catalogue for the SAQ and that’s how I learned “cat piss” is a legit tasting note for wine. Also that deaths in pharmaceutical studies are “serious adverse events.” My love for language deepened and my boss, Scott, patiently and insistently drilled into me a rock-solid attention to detail that was not part of my DNA but now reverberates in my bones.
It was the best job I ever had.
One of our clients was an ad agency that was doing boutique work out of Sherbrooke, and needed a lot of help with English-language content because they’d started doing original creative for national brands — Bayer, Johnson & Johnson — that wanted standalone Quebec marketing, but that in turn needed to be translated into English for the Quebec English market. Also loads and loads of translation for pharma studies, because the Université de Sherbrooke was a hospital school and there were drug trials stacked a mile deep there. I was the “creative guy” and they eventually crunched the numbers and realized it was cheaper to hire me than to keep hiring the company, so they offered and I accepted. I was the twelfth hire at the agency. Eight years later it was 52 people, and doing national campaigns for international brands, instead of the Quebec versions; holding down marketing for major pharmaceutical companies and making a name in the burgeoning area of animal health. The graphic designers – Dan, Charles, Charlie, Val, Élizabeth – were (and are) stone cold brilliant, and working with them was pure alchemy. Living in an environment where we transitioned from French to English and back seamlessly according to which word felt the most right at the moment was a joy. The account directors were driven but compassionate, and the owner had a rock-solid dedication to quality of life that was the envy of every other agency we ever met. I got to sit down with clients at the outset of mandates, pitch our work, and carry it to execution with our creative team. It was fits of boundless brilliance punctuated with camaraderie and discovery. I could spend three weeks immersed in swine vaccines, come up for air, and find myself learning every intricacy of the paperboard industry to launch a company, and then leap into developing patient adherence materials for a novel chemotherapy regimen.
It was the best job I ever had.
For a variety of reasons, Quebec stopped feeling like home, and when I looked for work, I was lucky enough to find Queen’s Law. I wasn’t going to apply but Mike — from the Eyeopener, and the shredded papers, remember? — was working there and said I totally should. So I did. I became the first director of marketing & communications at the school’s law faculty, despite not knowing a thing about law. From there, I got to grow a team that included alumni and advancement staff to turn it from a modest law school with no digital presence to arguably the most online law school in Canada. I got to expand from marketing and communications to alumni and advancement (university fundraising, for the uninitiated) work. Rare for higher ed, I got to see the full scope of our lifecycle, from the first outreach to high school students to alumni 50+ years out. We built a wildly successful national online undergraduate program in law, reinvented alumni communications, rebuilt our entire web presence, and became polyvalent storytellers on almost every channel we could get our hands on. I delved into research promotion with Canada’s finest legal scholars, and could spend a day rocketing from working on brand development for our pro bono clinics to structuring a Constitutional Law book launch, and develop a fundraising proposal for a new chair in business law over lunch. I learned that law is the secret lever that moves the world: that no matter what you do and where you go, if you live in society, law is the steady thrum that holds all of civilization together. The faculty are staggeringly brilliant, but so were the staff — and the students, who I admittedly had a lot of “law student” stereotypes about, were and are the most considerate, thoughtful, passionate and driven people I’ve ever met.
It was the best job I ever had.
Until four hours ago.
I’ve just put a pin in Queen’s Law, and starting tomorrow I’m officially the Director of Marketing and Communications at Queen’s Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. On paper it’s a lateral move, but as somebody who’s never made a choice based on titles or money, it’s a creative step into a thrilling unknown. It’s going to broaden my scope from law (which is itself a cosmos) to a dizzying array of sciences I can barely wrap my head around. I’m working with the people who build, and rebuild, the world. It’s the crackling excitement of students testing the frontiers of what they’re capable of, in Tony Stark labs with genius mentors urging them on. It’s reactors and robots and biomechanics and chemistry. It’s the technology that’s going to improve our lives, and possibly save them all. It’s literally the gosh-darn future sitting there waiting for stories to be told about it.
Tax-ratio fallacies are the first and greatest refuge of the Tax Whiner.
But what’s wrong with tax-ratio arguments?
TLDR: they’re vanity metrics.
We get jiggy with the logic below.
Why tax-ratio arguments are fallacies
So you’re chatting with somebody who has a compelling statistic. The city has higher taxes per person than another place, for instance, or a higher average amount paid per income, or… well, it could be anything, really. Taxes versus square kilometre of territory. Taxes per number of dwellings. Taxes per total number of daschunds. Taxes per average height of a citizen.
Ultimately, tax ratio arguments, “our taxes are the highest or lowest per ______________”, are kind of like IQ tests. If you have a great score, you can feel really good about it, and it’s fun to brag about at parties, but for any practical purposes, it’s trivia.
Explaining why it’s trivia takes a bit of math and a bit of civics and a certain amount of “if A, then B” logical thought. Oh, and just a smidge of Greek mythology. Buckle up!
Let’s start with a question of control.
There’s one element under municipal control, as far as taxes go: what they charge. Their rate.
Where does that rate come from?
Here’s the math part; it’s a pretty simple two-part formula, but worth repeating:
Part one:
municipal services
x
cost
=
revenue required
Part two:
revenue required
/
taxable assets in your territory
=
tax rate
This is grossly oversimplified and doesn’t take into account a lot of things, but it’s a napkin sketch of how taxes happen.
So why is this important to know?
The key thing is to look at this using common sense.
To manage a situation and to effect change, you have to look at what is under your control.
In the municipal case, it’s “services”.
The outcome of the two-step equation is “tax rate.”
It doesn’t account for population size*, or local income, or the number of weiner dogs in the territory.
*except to determine the scope of services it needs to provide above, but you knew that.
Why can’t it?
The better question is “how could it?”
It can’t, for a number of pretty common-sense reasons, chief among them this valuable bit of context:
Large municipalities require planning.
Municipal organizations are complex networks in charge of life-sustaining services, and planning happens (or should happen) on a scale of years to decades, not days to weeks.
Major infrastructure like water, roads, and waste needs to be planned and maintained. Large numbers of service groups like police, fire, garbage, and utilities need to be hired, trained, and managed. Parks and sporting infrastructure needs to be maintained. Finances have to be meticulously kept. Public transit needs to run. Tourists need to be attracted.
These aren’t “snap decision” kinds of areas, and when cities see disaster, it’s usually because somebody with a “runs like a business”2 mentality has tried to apply what is perfectly sound thinking for running a bait shack to running a municipality. The systems aren’t compatible.
So what happens when you try to apply “taxes as a percentage of average income” or other ratio-based arguments to a discussion about municipal taxes?
You’re introducing trivia to the conversation in the form of non-actionable information.
We’ll use “average tax paid, as a percentage of income” as a f’rinstance, but this applies to any ratio model, including square km, number of people who own ducks, total count of refrigerators – any datum that can provide a number to put on the right side while taxes are on the left.
So you’re talking to somebody that says “this town’s taxes are out of control! We have one of the highest average taxes paid, compared against income! Why, 5% of a citizen’s average income goes to taxes, and the average across the province is only 4.8%!”
To be fair, that legitimately sounds outrageous if you don’t think about it very much.
But let’s invest some thinkin’ time.
First assume good faith, and that the person in question is actually trying to have a helpful conversation and not just kvetching.
The key question becomes:
What, in this scenario, is in the municipality’s power to directly change?
They can’t increase local revenue (well, not directly*). Unlike the above equation, which starts with “services,” this is the ratio argument equation:
average income
/
taxes paid
=
taxes paid per average income
In the first equation, we started with “services”, which municipalities control. “Municipal services” is the starting point in a linear path to “tax rate.”
But here, there’s no municipal-adjustable equivalent. Even with the very best wishes and a spectacular wizard hat, municipal government can’t magically increase local revenue.*
They can adjust tax rates, but as we’ve shown above, tax rates are a direct derivative of services, and as the clear-eyed have noted, “services” represent a vast range of things that are more like a cruise ship than a unicycle – they take forethought, vision, and long-range planning to manage effectively. Radical changes to services to immediately slash tax rates generally read as “panic” and don’t end well, as a rule. “Income has fallen 0.5% so let’s not have police for three months” is not a great way to run things.
In the “average income” flavour of this argument, a good question to ask is “does the municipality charge income tax?” and if the answer is “no,” the follow-up question “so what does income have to do with our tax rate, exactly?” will usually flip the light switch.
*”Municipal government can’t increase local revenue” is actually not entirely true.
Municipalities make a huge difference in local revenue by making themselves attractive to new citizens, tourism, and employers. How do they do that?
By having great communities where people and businesses want to be, which requires fun things like good water, functioning sewers, police and fire, etc. These are “services,” and they’re what drive taxes. So if you want your tax-to-revenue ratio to improve – even though it’s a vanity metric – you should actually want to pay taxes for world-class services, to attract people and businesses, and improve revenue.
But they can’t directly affect total revenue, which is kind of the whole point.
Anyway, the above applies to any argument that relies on the forumula
tax rate
/
[VARIABLE]
=
tax rate per [VARIABLE]
whether it be average income, counting women named Barbara, total km of city streets, number of babies born per year, etc.
All right, sooooo…
So when you stake your whole argument on one of these ratios, you’re not actually complaining about taxes any more. You’re complaining about [VARIABLE].
And it’s all well and good to think that there aren’t enough daschunds in the city, or homes cost too much, or homes cost too little, or people don’t make enough money, but at that point you’re essentially saying [VARIABLE] is a problem, but you still think you’re upset about taxes, because you don’t understand how taxes work.
To put it another way…
The tax ratio fan can’t argue that the taxes aren’t fair (in Kingston’s case), because they are. That’s just math n’ geography. They’re upset about [VARIABLE], but they don’t really understand that [VARIABLE] is the problem… not the taxes.
So what’s the problem with these ratio arguments? They’re silly, but harmless. It’s just trivia, right?
Meh. One problem is that they get people who don’t have a firm grasp on math or civics all ginned up about something that doesn’t ultimately mean anything, which is a huge waste of energy and helps propagate a pervasive I-read-half-an-Ayn-Rand-novel “taxation is bad” fallacy that erodes a general understanding of civics. Shutting these things down helps foster a nuanced understanding of how society functions.
More practically, the ratio arguments also passively promote a model where municipalities should, say, continually adjust rates according to chicken count or total number of Dairy Queens or average income or people’s heights; they have the gloss of facts, but when you think about the facts of civics and the math underlying taxation, it’s a bonkers worldview to put forward.
Consider the kind of government you’d need to run to index crucial long-term service decisions based on the number of people named “Dave” in your catchment, which changes weekly (Daves come and go). But then somebody complains about the daschund ratio, and then the average height, and then, and then, and then…
If you don’t pay much attention, the ratio arguments are compelling, and next thing you know you’ve got a mayor who wants to “run things like a business” and ten years later you’re wondering how everything went to hell and why you’re on a boil water advisory.
So it’s worth time and energy to shut tax ratio arguments down as meaningless. Hey, I wrote this whole thing! Clearly I think it’s worthwhile.
So ratio presentations of taxation are useless?
No! They’re fun trivia, as mentioned above. If you’ve got, say, the lowest taxes paid per total number of swans in the city’s pond, you can put that on your website and the easily gulled will think you have low tax rates, regardless of what your tax rates actually are. You may have the highest tax rates and also the highest number of swans, but a sucker is born every minute.
The results can also derive some interesting ways to look at [VARIABLE], as long as it’s clear you’re on an investigation of [VARIABLE].
If you find Greek gods named “Zeus” are taxed more than anywhere else in the country, for instance, you may want to see if the Greek goddess Hera is working in your tax office.*
*That’s the Greek mythology, folks! Don’t forget to tip your waiter.
But tax rate is still the only rational metric of whether a city’s taxation is fair?
Yes. It’s pretty straightforward. Again, it takes a bit of math, some civics, and… well, honestly, you didn’t really need the Greek mythology. But it’s fairly linear after all.
1. A good test of “is my municipal government doing okay?” is to inverse this relationship. If the tax rate is fair, relative to comparable other places, and the services are adequate, the city’s doing a good job. If the tax rate is out of step with other municipalities, or the services are dismal, the city’s doing a bad job. In Kingston’s case, the services seem good and the tax rate is fair (see previous page), so I deem the City do be doing okay. There are always things to improve, but taking to the ramparts about taxation is a non-starter and a waste of everyone’s time.
2. One more time… If somebody’s answer to “should government be run like a business?” is anything other than “no, that is insane, a business’ ideal model is to maximize benefits for a tiny number of owners or shareholders, and a government’s ideal model is to maximize benefit for everyone, which is literally the exact opposite, so while it’s fine to say governments should pursue efficiency or not be wasteful, business is a ludicrous model, governments should be run like very good governments, and you should feel bad for even asking that question”, you can safely ignore anything they have to say about government, civics, economics and politics. Send them to this page and if they call you a “snowflake” or a “Neo-Marxist,” tell them I said they owe you a quarter.
