Your organisation has a problem, and its name is 3%

Written by
Josep Maria SanchónDirector de contenidos
Published
12 min read
Tags
Narrative and content

Every organisation holds more publishable knowledge than its communications and marketing department can generate on its own and yet, almost none of that knowledge ever reaches its target audience.

Un huerto inmenso de árboles cargados de fruta, cercado por un muro alto de piedra, se extiende hasta las montañas del fondo. En primer plano, fuera del muro, una figura pequeña con mochila, de espaldas, se aleja de la puerta abierta por un camino de tierra hacia un valle con un pueblo lejano, con una cesta pequeña en la mano. Junto a la puerta hay unas pocas frutas caídas en la hierba.
Everything the organisation knows is in the orchard; what actually gets published fits in one basket (DB/AI).

The best content an institution can publish lives in the head of the person who has spent fifteen years working in one specific area. That is the person who has already solved the problem the client or the user still doesn’t know how to put into words.

Where the asset is: knowledge, experience

In the report Enterprise Content and Marketing Trends: Insights for 2026 by the Content Marketing Institute, covering 296 marketing leaders at companies with more than 1,000 employees, 94% say they produce thought leadership content.

Easier said than done…

Almost 75% of those leaders admit that fewer than 15% of their in-house experts contribute to that content. And only 3% achieve broad participation, meaning more than half of their specialists take part. In other words: almost every large organisation produces expert content, and almost none manages to get its experts involved.

INFOGRAFÍAFrom 94% to 3%

Marketing leaders at companies with more than 1,000 employees. The three figures answer different questions in the same survey and do not form an arithmetic funnel.

94%

of the marketing leaders surveyed produce thought leadership content

Content Marketing Institute, 2026

75%

admit that fewer than 15% of their in-house experts contribute

Content Marketing Institute, 2026

3%

get more than half of their experts to contribute

Content Marketing Institute, 2026

That gap between 94% and 3% matters more every year. Because it means that what gets published under the label of expert knowledge is, in most cases, being written by someone who is not the expert. Exactly the opposite of what these new times are asking of us.

It isn’t a lack of willingness

The easy reading would be that specialists simply aren’t interested in sharing what they know. The available data points elsewhere.

The barrier that always comes first is time. A survey published in Frontiers in Communication, covering 530 US scientists, ranks it as the most cited obstacle, at 84%. A much smaller British study published this year in Immunology & Cell Biology (99 responses) reaches 81% and adds a figure that is even more telling: 59% point to a lack of institutional support or recognition, and only a third feel their institution truly backs this work.

Behind time sits training, or rather its absence. The Wellcome and RCUK survey of 2015, covering 2,454 UK researchers, found that 79% had received no training in public engagement in the previous five years, and that almost half had never even been offered any. It is a decade-old measurement, and it remains the reference because nobody has repeated it at that scale.

And there is a third, more uncomfortable layer. In 2006 the Royal Society asked 1,485 UK researchers what held them back: 64% said they needed that time for their research, and one in five added that those who put a lot of effort into communicating are not well regarded by their peers. Twenty years on, the 2026 British study still records the same complaint.

Spain is no different, and something else happens there too

The broadest Spanish portrait available was published in PLOS ONE in 2019, with fieldwork in 2016, covering 1,022 scientists at Spanish institutions. Its conclusion: researchers describe themselves as trapped between a moral obligation to engage and a professional environment that does not allow it, for lack of time and academic recognition. The authors add that most receive no specific training, and that what little exists reaches mainly the youngest.

That recognition was a real problem is confirmed by the institutional response. Crue and FECYT published a guide for assessing public engagement activity in academic careers, whose second version dates from November 2024.

And there is a Spanish barrier that does not show up in the Anglo-Saxon surveys. In December 2024, the Science Media Centre España published a survey of 237 researchers who communicate in the media: 51% say they have suffered some kind of attack, with higher incidence among women, and 16.55% of those negative experiences end with the researcher giving up public engagement. One in six episodes of hostility ends with one expert fewer speaking in public.

The other half of the problem is internal

The Content Marketing Institute points to the organisation’s share of the problem, although it should be taken for what it is: the diagnosis of its analysts, not a survey finding. They describe it like this: risk review, legal review, brand review, leadership review and the endless parade of alignment meetings make ideas lose altitude before they ever take off.

Anyone who has worked with a science-related institution will recognise the circuit.

We are asking for the wrong thing

Put the two halves together and the diagnosis changes completely. The problem is not one of motivation or ideas, but of design: we are asking a professional to do a job that is not theirs, without specific training, on top of their own, and then to walk it through five approval circuits.

Seen that way, the fact that only 3% pull it off stops being surprising and becomes exactly what you would expect.

The way out is to stop asking them to write. An expert can explain in forty-five minutes of conversation something they would never find the time to organise and write up over several days, simply because talking about what they know is part of their craft, while writing an article is not part of their daily work and keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list… where its moment never arrives.

The organisation’s job is to turn those forty-five minutes into publishable material. That division of labour is neither new nor ours: it is what the literature on knowledge elicitation has been doing for decades in other fields, where nobody asks the expert to document their judgement, only to answer a protocol of questions.

A four-step method

The four steps

What we propose fits into four moves, and none of them requires the expert to write a single line.

01Start from the real question, not the keyword

The questions that reach an organisation are in the customer service enquiries, in what families ask, in what a sales rep repeats every week. That inventory usually exists already, in disorder, and it is a better starting point than any ranking tool.

02Draw the knowledge out by talking

A forty-five-minute recorded interview, with a script prepared in advance by someone who has done their homework. The responsibility for making the conversation productive lies with the person asking, not the person answering.

03Write it up outside and return it for validation, not rewriting

The expert checks that the facts, the nuances and the caveats are correct. They do not review the style, the structure or the headline. Confusing those two things is what turns a twenty-minute validation into three weeks of emails.

04One approval circuit, with names and a deadline

Who signs off, in what order and by when, decided before starting rather than along the way. Most articles that die inside an institution are never rejected by anyone: they sit waiting for someone to say something.

None of the four steps is complicated. What it demands is that someone holds them in place, and that is where it usually breaks down.

Why the effort is worth it

It is worth asking what is gained, because setting this up has a cost.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer 2026, covering almost 34,000 people in 28 countries, ranks “my employer” as the most trusted institution in the world, at 78%, ahead of business in general at 64%, NGOs at 58%, the media at 54% and governments at 53%. People trust the organisations they work for and, by extension, the people who speak from inside them.

The thought leadership report Edelman produces with LinkedIn points the same way. Its latest edition is from 2025, and two limitations should be declared before citing it: the fieldwork is American and it was administered through the platform itself. With those caveats, between 64% and 65% of the decision-makers surveyed, depending on their profile, say an organisation’s thought leadership content is a more reliable basis for judging its capabilities than its marketing materials and product sheets.

There is also a study published in Scientific Reports in June 2026, three online experiments with around 591 participants in total, which found that an author’s academic credentials raise the perceived credibility of a popular science text, while appealing to personal experience has no measurable effect. Signing with a name and a job title is not a courtesy; it is part of the argument.

How we can help you unlock knowledge that “is worth money”

No organisation we work with is fully staffed to do this on its own. Preparing interviews with specialists, writing from them and holding an approval circuit together, editing, generating dynamic charts from raw material, translating and publishing.

That is exactly the part we do. We set up the process that turns the knowledge you already have into something publishable, and we hold it in place long enough for it to stop depending on anyone’s goodwill.

If you want a way to gauge the size of your opportunity, do this count: how many people in your organisation know something a client, a patient or a student would pay to read, and how many of them have published anything this year. The distance between those two figures is your untapped asset, and it probably looks a lot like that 3%.

Sources

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