- Have any questions?
- 02 7200 2179
- media@commsroom.co
- Have any questions?
- 02 7200 2179
- media@commsroom.co
Tess Corkish, Social Media Advisor at CSIRO, shares insights on balancing wit and professionalism in public sector communications.
Tess is a speaker at the upcoming Public Sector Comms Week 2025.
There are three main questions to ask when trying to incorporate humour into government communications. The first is “is there something funny about this story/issue?”. The second is “will the public respond positively to the government making a joke about this?”. The third is “is this content respectful and safe for all audiences?” The answer to all three questions must be a resounding “yes”.
There may be elements of a story or issue that are darkly funny, and there may be a great content trend going on, but government might be the completely wrong mouthpiece to jump onto the trend.
For example, while our team as individuals are just as amused as our audience might be by dark jokes about the cost-of-living, it is tone deaf for a government agency to appear to make light of such an issue.
When we’re creating humorous content at CSIRO, we’ll start from multiple different points. We can start by promoting a new story (and find an amusing hook to promote it), we can start with a meme trend or idea that we’ve seen online and find a relevant CSIRO connection, or we’ll look at significant days coming up and start from there.
We have brainstorms for each of these content types and are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to make our content fun and engaging. Some of the time, there’ll be a perfect match straight away, but often we’ll go through many ideas that will never see the light of day before we end up with the final post.
The main thing we consider when ensuring humour doesn’t undermine the professionalism of the message is our brand personality and voice. Our brand personality is geeky cool, and our brand voice is playful, awe-inspiring, inquisitive, high quality, authentic and informed.
Each person in our team understands what that means. It means that we are au fait with pop culture, but in a way that’s relatable and earnest. It means we love science and nature, and we don’t care who knows it, and know which nudibranch matches Heidi Klum’s outfit on a red carpet.
We work closely together to make sure the content is hitting the right note.
We’re careful to make sure we understand the butt of the joke, and make sure it’s punching up rather than down. For example, invasive species make for a great enemy, and native species make for a great hero. We make sure that our subject matter experts feel comfortable with the way we’re communicating their work, and where possible, we take them along the creative journey with us.
A common narrative we feed into is a self-deprecating one of being so passionate about science or nature that it makes us ignore social cues. Our audience relates to that passion and comes to expect that in our content.
There are two main reasons why we publish informal and humorous content.
The first is that when we create content that’s “unreasonably funny for a government agency”, it surprises people and prompts them to engage. This means our content gets shown to more people and creates greater trust and a larger audience for the organisation.
If the content is specifically trying to explain a complex or serious issue, funny content is thumb-stopping, so people spend more time taking that information in. For example, comparing mosquitoes to the guy in Love Actually who holds up a sign saying “to me, you are perfect” drives people to an article on our website with science-backed tips to avoid getting bitten.
It’s also a way to draw attention to our stories when we don’t have high-quality visuals available. For example, when a rare handfish was spotted for the first time in 25 years but the photo was underwhelming, we asked our colleagues to draw it (with varying degrees of success)!
It’s about cutting through the noise on increasingly crowded social feeds and increasing scientific literacy at the same time.
Take your pick! There are always going to be haters. Whether it’s an internal stakeholder who doesn’t understand, or the commenter who thinks resourcing should be spent on science instead of communications.
We have a strong strategy we can point to to educate internal stakeholders, and a wealth of data that shows a clear link between humour and eyes on content. And we’ve also got leadership that supports us. For people in the comments, we explain that humorous content is important to get eyes and clicks on our posts. Fortunately, these are few and far between.
Read also: Mitchell Dye on exploring the societal ripple effects of social media
We don’t always get it right. There have been times where our audience has taken our content in a way that was both unintended and unconsidered by us. If they have a genuine point, or if there are many folks who share that opinion, we’ll remove or alter the post.
When CSIRO is lucky enough to have a float in Mardi Gras, we run a social media campaign around it to communicate why it’s important for Australia’s national science agency to be attending.
As part of this campaign, we share stories from our different LGBTIQA+ staff members, share clips from the march itself, and generally celebrate the diversity in our community.
The content is not without pushback, but we also get incredibly positive feedback from large sections of our audience.
One of the posts we published last year combined our support for the LGBTIQA+ community with our love of nature, and matched LGBTIQA+ flags with Australian birds. This was our most popular post of the campaign, and one of our top performing posts for the month. Our LGBTIQA+ audience loved identifying themselves with an Australian bird and had some great comebacks to any discriminatory comments.
We also used humour in promoting the staff profiles (with their full co-operation!), for example, “putting the trans in transdisciplinary”, and while we shared the sometimes-confronting realities of discrimination, the whole campaign was about celebrating diversity and difference.
In my session during Public Sector Comms Week 2025, I offer a front row seat to a bunch of memes that I think should’ve performed far better than they did.
If that’s not enough of a sweetener, I hope to offer you some tips to start incorporating more humorous content, whether you’re already tossing a few into the content calendar or you’re not sure where to start.
I hope to help you make a case to your higher-ups for including more humorous content and create a decision-making flow for where it’s most appropriate. And most of all, I hope you’ll leave with the confidence to fail as many times as it takes you to succeed.
