Communicating for Education or Engagement? (Copy)

I was thinking about a conversation I had yesterday with our intern about the difference between designing content for education and designing for promotion. We are creating educational materials that provide real skills, but if no one sees them, it doesn’t really matter how good they are or how much time we put into them. I asked our intern to do some clips from some of our videos so we could share them on social media, but to be perfectly honest, they didn’t clip well. I didn’t think the clips would help us with our goal of getting our content to people who wanted it, so with sincere appreciation for her taking the time to do the work, I suggested we switch directions.

So, if our goal is people using our content, how do we reach them? That requires a *marketing* approach. But MPH students like our intern aren’t taught that. I asked if she’d ever watched Shark Tank (yes). What’s one of the first questions they ask? “What problem is this addressing?” That’s what we need to do to market our content. Identify a problem, show how it’s relevant to our audience, and offer a solution that they can actually implement (i.e. watching YouTube videos).

Communicating for education is not the same as communicating for engagement. Too often, though, the second part isn’t given the attention it deserves, in part because it’s not incentivized as much as the first part (your grant might cover the creation of the materials, not promoting them) and also because people just don’t know how to do it.