Institutions continue to craft messages for public feeds whilst their audiences make decisions, form opinions and share information in WhatsApp groups and Telegram channels that no institutional algorithm can reach. Being late to this shift is not a technical problem. It raises questions about how trust works when public visibility disappears and what remains are relationships, proximity and shared judgement.
This blog is not a tutorial on tools. It is a reflection on what changes when an institution decides to be present in these spaces, and what it needs to understand before attempting to do so.
In a public feed, institutional authority operates through recognisable signals: the logo, an official tone, the number of followers, and visual consistency. The reader knows they are consuming communication from an organisation and activates the corresponding filters, for better or for worse.
In a closed WhatsApp or Telegram group, those signals disappear or lose their weight. What circulates comes via people, not organisations. A message from an institution entering that space does not compete with other institutions: it competes with the trust that group members have in one another.
The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2024, based on a survey of nearly 100,000 people across 47 countries, found that WhatsApp is used for news consumption by 21% of the global sample, with sustained growth, particularly outside Western Europe. It adds a more specific point: the content circulating on WhatsApp comes from close circles, which generates greater perceived trust. Paradoxically, this also means that critical defences are lower. People do not verify what someone they trust sends them with the same rigour.
For institutions, this has a direct implication: entering these spaces without understanding how relational authority works within them produces the opposite effect to that intended. A message that would sound credible in an official feed may be perceived in a private group as an intrusion, propaganda or noise.
The shift is not uniform. It varies by geography, age group, topic and prior level of institutional trust. In contexts where trust in traditional media is historically low or where internet access is primarily via mobile devices, WhatsApp is not an alternative to news channels; it is the main channel. In Europe, the shift is more selective. Still, it is concentrated precisely in the groups that are hardest for institutions to reach: communities with lower trust in traditional media, activist networks, informal professional groups, and migrant communities.
What all these spaces have in common is that the institution cannot reach them directly without relational mediation. There is no way to “post” in a closed group to which one does not belong. There are only ways to be present through people who are already part of that group and who consider institutional information worth sharing.
Trust in public institutional channels is built through coherence, transparency and consistency over time. It is a trust earned and verified in public.
Trust in closed messaging works differently. It is not about trusting the institution, but about trusting the person who introduces the information into the group. That person acts as an intermediary and, by sharing something, is putting their own credibility on the line. If the institutional content turns out to be unhelpful, confusing, or perceived as self-serving, the damage falls not only on the institution but also on the person who shared it.
This radically changes how institutional communication intended for circulation in such spaces should be designed.
Content shared in closed groups is subject to different criteria from those applied to content published on official channels. In an institutional feed, the main criteria are the source’s relevance and credibility. In a private group, the main criteria are the usefulness to the members of that specific group and the intermediary’s comfort in sharing it.
A well-written technical document may be highly valuable on an official channel yet completely unusable in a WhatsApp group because nobody is going to read eight pages in that context. A short thread with actionable information on something the group needs to resolve today can circulate easily because the person sharing it doesn’t need to explain why: it speaks for itself.
The question that institutions rarely ask themselves is: Is this content useful to the recipient, or is it useful to the sender? Most institutional communication is designed with the latter in mind.
The Reuters Institute highlights this paradox clearly: content circulating on WhatsApp comes from people we know, which reduces critical distance. This is an opportunity for institutions whose community partners have high credibility within these groups. But it is also a risk: if institutional information is inaccurate, incomplete or arrives at the wrong time, reputational damage spreads at the same speed and through the very same channels of trust that could have helped it.
The short answer is: very little directly, and a great deal through others.
The long answer requires understanding that an institution’s presence on closed messaging platforms is not designed from within the institution; it is shaped by the relationships the institution has built outside those spaces. The work does not begin when someone decides to ‘join WhatsApp’. It begins earlier, with the quality of the connections with people who are already part of those networks.
A community ally, in this context, is neither a spokesperson nor a brand ambassador. They are someone who has their own credibility within a group, who understands its codes and needs, and who decides on their own initiative that certain institutional information is worth sharing. The institution cannot control that decision. It can only influence it indirectly, through the quality of the relationship it maintains with that person and the proven usefulness of their previous content.
This has important strategic implications. It means that the work of identifying, nurturing, and listening to these allies comes before and is more important than any decision regarding format or platform. And it means that the institution needs to be prepared to produce content that does not put its name in the spotlight, content that is useful to the community rather than visible to the organisation.
The European legal framework reinforces this logic from another angle. A recent analysis of the classification of WhatsApp and Telegram under the Digital Services Act (DSA) concludes that WhatsApp groups are not considered hosting services within the meaning of the DSA, meaning they operate under a different regulatory framework than public platforms. For European institutions, this implies that the transparency and moderation rules that apply to their public channels do not automatically extend to these spaces. The responsibility for determining how to intervene rests entirely with the institution and its partners.
The most delicate tension in this area is that between “being present” and “monitoring”. Institutions that attempt to track what is circulating in closed groups on their topics, or that participate in these spaces with the primary aim of correcting narratives, are often perceived exactly as they are: organisations that monitor private conversations.
The strategic alternative is not absence, but a presence built on genuine listening and demonstrated usefulness. This involves three decisions that must be made before any intervention:
If an institution listens to what is circulating in closed groups and does not change how it works, listening serves no purpose.
Closed messaging reveals to an institution things its own channels will never reveal. It reveals how people describe the problems the institution is trying to solve, which questions go unanswered on official channels, what information is circulating that the institution is unaware of, and which individuals hold real credibility within those communities, regardless of their formal position.
That information is strategic, not operational. It is not useful for tweaking a tweet. It is useful for understanding whether the institutional narrative is connected to the reality of the people it aims to reach, or whether it is talking to itself in a space where no one lives.
The institutions that have best managed communication in low-trust contexts are not those that have produced the most content or been present on the most platforms. They are those who have been able to listen in the spaces where their audiences speak unfiltered and have adjusted their communication accordingly. In many current contexts, closed messaging is that space.
The question institutional communication teams need to ask themselves is not whether they should be on WhatsApp or Telegram, but rather whether they should be on either platform. It is whether they have built the relationships and the kind of content that would justify their presence in those spaces from the perspective of those who inhabit them, not from their own need for visibility.
That is harder than simply opening a channel. And that is precisely why it is worth the effort.
If you work in institutional communications and have tried to reach audiences on closed messaging platforms, I’d be interested to hear on LinkedIn what you’ve found: what has worked, what has been rejected, and what it has taught you about how those communities understand the information they receive.
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