This week’s edition:

I'd been invited into a weekly group chat with a new cohort of Meltwater sales hires — no managers, just sharp people recently hired from other industries, trying to figure out what comms, PR, and measurement is really about.

I'd been working with several of them one-on-one on accounts where the Data-Driven Communications framework was being deployed and adopted by the client. They thought the rest of the cohort should hear about it.

I love rooms like this because outsiders challenge the status quo. They ask the questions old stalwarts like me sometimes stop asking. It’s simply what happens when you are doing the same thing for 10+ years.

The conversation flowed and the questions were rapid-fire. I felt like a teacher in front of a room of MBAs. Then one guy said:

I should have been ready. I have the data. 8% of clients operate at level 4 on the DDC maturity model. I should have rattled off names. Instead, I fumbled. Mumbled and rambled my way through it trying to explain how certain people were doing it.

The call ended. I felt sick about it all weekend.

And with Meltwater Summit this week, I've been thinking about it even harder. Because Summit is exactly the kind of event where this question comes up, again and again.

Here's why I struggled — and what I realized.

We've now assessed over 500 communicators. Roughly 40 of them scored at Level 4 (”Visionary”). I've personally worked with three quarters of that group, so I sat down and stared at the list and asked myself what they had in common.

It wasn't industry. It wasn't budget. It wasn't even leadership at the top. It was staring right at me.

It was structure. It was their job titles.

One of those teams is at a Fortune 100 tech company — three people in a dedicated comms measurement function. Their original leader has since moved on, and the two who remain still score at level 3. When the new leader takes the assessment, I'd bet money she scores high too — because the workflow, the culture, and the structure are already there to hold her up.

Same pattern at a global consulting firm. Same at a Fortune 100 financial services company. Same across most of the visionary list.

The companies doing it right have built dedicated comms measurement units.

The teams stuck at level 2 (”Planners” who are proactive when it comes to using data, but not strategic) almost always make this same move. They buy a tool and expect the entire team to become great at it.

That's like United Airlines buying a new 747 and expecting every employee to fly it. Everyone on the crew should understand how the plane works. But the pilot, the flight attendants, the ground crew, the refueling team — they each have a different relationship with that aircraft. It’s specialized by design.

The best comms teams work the same way. Everyone uses data, but not everyone is the analyst. And there's a healthy tension between the people doing the work and the people measuring it — that tension is a feature, not a bug. When you take a creative and curious communicator, and pair them with a clever and eager analyst, magic happens.

So when leaders ask me how to get to level 4, the honest answer isn't "train everyone harder." It's: invest in people, not just tools. Identify the specialists already on your team. Equip them. Enable them. Then build the rest of the team's data fluency around them.

To the new hires who were on that call Friday: this is the answer I should have given you. And good news: you're on this newsletter list, so you're hearing it now. Thank you for the question. It's the one that's been on my mind ever since. 🙂

To everyone else: you can't identify your specialists by guessing. You need a diagnostic.

The DDC Maturity Assessment was built for exactly this. It scores individuals across nine competencies and shows you, at a glance,

It's the same instrument we used to identify those 40 visionaries in the first place.

Run it with your team. We'll generate a benchmarked report so you can see your specialists, your gaps, and your trajectory against the 500+ communicators we've already studied.

If you'd rather start with yourself, take the assessment individually first and see what your team is in for.

Talk soon, Dino

P.S. — Meltwater Summit is this week. If you're there, come find me. If not, I'll have plenty to share next edition.

P.P.S. — Two things launching this month: the new DDC North Star course, and a data storytelling course from three-time bestselling author and Data Storytelling expert Sam Knowles. Details soon.