Building a Subject Matter Expert Program

Every organization has subject matter experts. The specialist who's been working on a particular program for fifteen years. The officer who's spent a career in a niche investigative area. The public health nurse who can explain a complex situation in terms that actually reach people. The engineer who understands infrastructure issues in ways nobody else in the organization does.

Most organizations leave these people completely unused as communication assets. Their expertise lives inside the organization, occasionally surfaces in a briefing document, and never reaches the public who would benefit from hearing it directly.

A Subject Matter Expert program is the infrastructure that changes this. It's a deliberate, managed approach to identifying people with valuable expertise, developing their communication capacity, and deploying them strategically as organizational spokespersons.

Done well, it does something no amount of news releases and social media posts can replicate: it puts a human face on your organization's work, builds authentic credibility with your community, and develops communication capacity across the organization rather than concentrating it in the communications team alone.