I edit and ghostwrite the internal employee newsletter for a large business unit of a major healthcare organization. You could say this newsletter has just one audience – employees of this Fortune 500 company.

I often deal with internal writers, particularly ones from the technical departments, who make exactly that assumption: All newsletter readers are employees.

Then they unconsciously add a corollary: Therefore, all newsletter readers are a lot like the employees in my department.

I can read the exasperation in their virtual voices as I pepper them with questions in an attempt to find simpler language and step-by-step explanation of processes: “Geez, lady, we’re a healthcare company. Our people understand medical jargon.”

I keep having to point out that not everyone who works for a healthcare company is a healthcare professional. The people in front-line customer service jobs aren’t healthcare professionals. Neither are the folks in HR, finance, security, logistics, or the warehouse.

Add to that the fact that these employees run the gamut in terms of their education and fluency in English. We’ve got doctors and researchers with multiple degrees, and we’ve got people who have high school diplomas or GEDs. At both ends and everywhere in between, we have recent immigrants from many different countries. They all have enough English to do their jobs, but in the technical departments “enough” doesn’t have to add up to anything like fluency.

We need to reach all of these people with this one newsletter.

How?

Aim it at those with the least knowledge and the least fluency.

I aim for the guy behind the forklift who has a high school diploma from Guatemala. Visualizing someone specific makes it easier for me.

Now sometimes the topic is too technical for Forklift Guy to understand unless we gave him a book full of pictures. Forklift Guy may not have a firm grasp of what microbiology is. (Nor do I, for that matter.)

The ways in which process improvements in the Microbiology department have reduced error rates and improved efficiency are likely to be beyond his grasp. But we can at least make sure that Forklift Guy understands the “lead” or opening sentence. He’ll get the point of “The Microbiology department has made small changes in the past few months that are leading to big improvements.”

If his eyes glaze over not much further into the article, so be it. He knows as much as he needs to. I’ll just keep writing in the simplest, most direct style I can manage given the subject matter, hoping to reach as many of these diverse employees as I can.

It’s not like the MDs and PhDs are going to mind. Not all of them are up on the latest in the Micro department. And not one of them likes to work any harder than necessary. If these high-level folks are going to add “read the employee newsletter” to their already bulging to-do lists, I have to make it easy for them.

Of course I do more than that. I provide short but informative headlines, use short paragraphs and lots of lists, include photos and other illustrations whenever possible – all those things that make any written communication easier to read.

Still, it all comes down to trying to reach Forklift Guy, knowing that if I can grab him, and make this content both interesting and accessible to him, then I can reach virtually everyone else.

So I guess I lied to you. I’m not giving you tips (in the plural) for reaching many audiences with one communication.

I have just one tip: Go for the least common denominator, or the least you’re reasonably able to reach. When you do, all your readers will thank you.