Good Work Deserves to Be Seen: The Case for Louder Dissemination in Public Health
Internal reports, PDF’s, academic conferences… this is where so many public health organizations lose their audience and more importantly, miss the opportunity to share their impact. At a time when public health work is so undervalued and unappreciated, public health organizations need to be louder, direct, and at the forefront of their dissemination.
We need to explicitly connect the dots between program and impact, and easily quantify how your organization’s work has improved lives within the community.
But how do health organizations make this connection? Through robust and sustainable evaluation frameworks.
When we think of evaluation, we often frame it as a tool for accountability and transparency, or future forecasting. But there is a third equally important role that evaluation serves: helping health organizations tell their story through data. Evaluation allows an organization to translate dollars spent into success stories like increased food access, lives saved in naloxone distribution, or even percentage increase in vaccination rates. By sharing success stories, you also give the public an opportunity to understand your organization’s work in a way that makes sense to them.
Let’s talk through some ways in which we can use evaluation to disseminate your work and show the true value your organization brings to your community.
Turn findings into stories, not just reports
Most people do not want to read a 30-page report with dense tables and long narratives. By transforming your data into a compelling story, you can share personalized metrics around lives impacted, improvements in measurable outcomes, and how the program directly impacted your audience. Utilizing infographics, digestible statistics, and impact-oriented language helps make the program’s outcomes more accessible for a non-technical audience. For more information on how to use data to tell a compelling story, take the “Break the Starvation Cycle” course.
Utilize trusted messengers and partners
Partners are crucial for engaging community members beyond an organizations immediate network. When selecting partners, it is important to be strategic and cultivate a relationship based on who has preexisting community buy-in. Church leaders, school officials, and healthcare providers are well positioned to share your organizations work directly with their communities, and people are often more receptive when the information comes from someone they know and already trust. Utilizing trusted partners and messengers’ helps programs expand their communication audience and increases the number of individuals championing and disseminating your impact.
Leverage preexisting observances
Have you ever logged on to social media to see that it is World Running Day and thought, “I didn’t know there was a day for that”? Well, that is an observance you can use for your own dissemination! Let’s say you work in an anti-smoking coalition and want a creative way to discuss community impact. You can use World Running Day to connect how quitting smoking improves cardiovascular health and stamina. Then, highlight the impact by quantifying how your organization helped individuals improve their athletic performance. You could take it a step further by partnering with a local run club to host a 5K to amplify your message, expand your reach, and connect with new audiences.
Be louder!
Public health organizations can no longer blend into the background of everyday life. Your organization is improving lives, increasing access to healthcare, and centering community driven work. Your impact-oriented work deserves to be recognized just as much as any profit driven institution.
If you are ready to connect your data to a story and share it in your community, but not sure where to start, take the Behavioral Health Clarity + Impact + Funding Scorecard. The scorecard will provide useful insights on your goals, how you measure and demonstrate success, and in turn how that leads to funding to sustain your work.
