When you need to communicate data impacts to different audiences with varying levels of data literacy, do you tailor your messaging for each audience, or do you just align it with the lowest common knowledge level?

I always tailor my messaging based on the audience’s data literacy rather than aligning it with the lowest common level. For executive or non-technical stakeholders, I focus on high-level business impacts, keeping it simple and avoiding technical jargon. For managers or analysts with intermediate understanding, I blend business context with some data specifics, using visuals and numbers to make insights actionable. For technical teams, I dive into the methodology, assumptions, and detailed analysis, ensuring full transparency. This way, each group gets the information they need, without feeling overwhelmed or under-informed, while keeping the core message consistent.

Normally we refine the communication based on the audience and have different communication versions tailored to the relevant audience (executives, technical teams etc...). For executives specifically we link it to business values and business strategy.

I usually structure my communication based on the target community, if it is an engineering community then I tailor it to engineering speak etc.  which means that sometimes I send multiple communications.  

You can adapt Gartner's "Business Value Pyramid" into a framework for determining the expected data literacy of your audience and the types of metrics that will resonate with them. If the audience is Executives, the data impacts should be conveyed in terms of performance metrics. If your audience is Information Stewards, the impacts can be conveyed in terms of data quality. However, I recommend that the higher-order metrics always be conveyed along with the targeted metrics given the literacy of your audience because doing so ensures your audience is routinely re-educated on how everything boils up to the impacts senior leadership cares about. While Information Stewards are accountable and responsible for data quality and thus focus on it, they must understand how the data quality relates to the higher order business metrics; otherwise, the data quality program will prioritize activities that become increasingly disconnected from what leadership actually cares about.

I would say that it's probably tailored in such ways that it would accommodate the masses unless it were a very targeted solution. In which case, we would tailor it to the specific audience that we're addressing. We would work with the powers that be, who were trained and specialized in these types of communications, to make sure that we were tying off on all of the nuances that would need to be looked after to ensure that it resonated with the targeted group of folks that we wanted to share the news with.