S3: Ep 2 | Building Trust In Government Communications | Fresh Perspectives

What does ownership look like when your audience is an entire city? Martine Maingot leads centralised communications for the Equity and Inclusion Cabinet at the City of Boston — eight departments, six initiatives, around 80 people in the cabinet and roughly 18,000 across the city, communicating in twelve languages besides English. Asked what she owns, her answer is immediate: the connective tissue between the departments. David Bowman and Jarbas Horst talk to Martine about how communications has changed since her first internship in 2004, when social media was blocked at work as a distraction. About the discipline of one message and seven touches, where the core claim stays fixed and only the format moves. About why word of mouth remains the most powerful channel there is, and why a message that takes a paragraph to explain will never travel. The conversation also gets into the harder edges of the job: the question she asks herself before any difficult message goes out, why communicators are gatekeepers of the narrative, and exactly where she draws the line on AI. Key topics covered: [00:00] Intro [00:25] How Jarbas and Martine met in Boston [00:59] Owning the connective tissue [02:11] Social determinants of health [02:57] Twelve languages, and thriving rather than just living [04:07] How communications has changed in twenty years [04:21] 2004, when social media was blocked at work [05:19] Copy got shorter and video became king [07:20] Start with the audience, then get boots on the ground [09:40] One message, seven touches [11:10] The cherry Coke lesson in word of mouth [12:07] When a manager or a chatbot is the intermediary [12:52] Prepping people and multiplying feedback by 25 [13:39] The Netflix of the Equity Cabinet [15:18] Banks answer to shareholders, cities answer to residents [16:20] Who is this protecting? Who is this costing? [17:36] AI as a tool, not the decision maker [20:13] Where the line is — trust is a human call [21:39] Terminator 2, and using AI like spell check [22:48] The gap between practitioners and leadership [23:23] “Computers are never gonna be a thing” [25:08] One decision she wishes were hers Subscribe for more on internal communications, intranets and the digital workplace. Fresh Perspectives is brought to you by Fresh, making SharePoint work harder for your organisation.