A reanalysis of a Kenyan higher education communication audit suggests that asking which channel works best may miss a more useful question: how does information move from discovery to action?
An institution can publish a message successfully and still leave people searching for answers.
A student may first see an examination notice on social media, ask a classmate what it means, visit an official portal to confirm the details and then take the required action.
The information has moved across several sources before helping the student complete the task.
Institutional communication is often measured one channel at a time. We compare social media reach, email engagement, website traffic, printed notices and face-to-face communication, then ask:
Which channel works best?
A reanalysis of a communication audit at a large multi-campus health-training institution in Kenya suggests the answer depends on what we measure.
The source study included 92 participants: 87 questionnaire respondents and five senior-management key informants.
The rankings changed depending on the measure
Print recorded the highest awareness at 73.6%, followed by social media at 69.0%.
When respondents identified the channels they used most frequently, print and social media were tied at 48.3%.
Electronic channels showed the widest difference. Awareness stood at 51.7%, while reported frequent use was 19.5%, producing a 32.2 percentage-point gap in the reanalysis.
The pattern shifted again when respondents rated how strongly different channels contributed to their information needs. Social media recorded the highest internal consistency at 66.7%, followed by face-to-face communication at 62.1%. Print stood at 44.8%.
The ranking therefore changed depending on whether we measured awareness, use or contribution to information needs.
That is why a single channel ranking can miss part of the communication story.
Follow the information
A more useful approach may be to look at what people do with information after they encounter it.
Someone may discover information through one source, interpret it through another and seek an official source for confirmation before deciding what to do.
This thinking led to the proposed Institutional Information Journey:
Discovery → Interpretation → Confirmation → Decision → Action → Sharing
An information need or trigger may start the journey, while resolution reflects whether the underlying task was completed successfully. Sharing can also start another person’s journey.
The framework is a conceptual extension of the original audit. The archived data did not follow individual respondents through each stage, so future research will need to test how these journeys unfold in real communication situations.
For communication teams, the idea offers a practical planning tool.
Take an examination change, fee deadline or registration requirement.
Where should people first encounter the information? Where can they get clarification? Which source should provide authoritative confirmation? What action should follow?
These questions encourage communication teams to think about how channels work together across an information journey.
Reach, awareness and channel use remain useful measures. Their value grows when they are connected to what happens after the message reaches the audience.
That raises a bigger question: How does information move across sources until someone can understand it, trust it, and act with confidence?
The visual report below explores the findings and introduces the proposed Institutional Information Journey.
Explore the Research
Read the visual report here: From Channels to Information Journeys; Reframing Institutional Communication in a Multi-Campus Higher Education Institution in Kenya.
For readers interested in the research design, theoretical foundations, detailed findings, limitations and proposed framework, the full scholarly paper follows.
Read the full scholarly paper here: From Channels to Information Journeys.