Unit 3: The Communications Package

Overview

Quality research, such as the development of a policy brief, becomes valuable when it is shared. Research should not be left on a shelf but used strategically to increase knowledge and, in many cases, to persuade others to act. This is how the advocacy potential of a policy brief is fully realized.

The material covered in this unit will support the development of a communications package designed to disseminate the advocacy messages of the policy brief. The communications package will include a simplified strategic communication plan, as well as three communication documents: a presentation, an infographic, and a professional blog posting.

Principles and best practices of knowledge mobilization, as an element of strategic communication planning, are explored. In addition, to support the development of a communications package, we will cover skills and techniques related to the development of communication materials across multiple modalities.

By the end of this unit, you will be able to:

Topics

Consider each section of this unit as the close equivalent to a standard week of work in a 3-credit, 13-week course. Plan to spend about 3–4 hours working the course material in each section, plus additional time to apply the information to work on your course project.

Here is a visual reminder of how the course assignments build on each other:

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Course Project: Pathway for Knowledge Mobilization

Steps Completed:

1. Proposal

2. Policy Brief

You are Here:

3. Communication Package

• Mobilize your idea from the Policy Brief
• Isolate key messages and recommendations for audiences
• Produces multi-media communication documents

Key Communications Package Point: Demonstrate sharing those recommendations broadly

3.1: Preparing for Knowledge Mobilization

In this section, we will explore some theory and best practices for the development of a strategic plan for the dissemination of your research. Then, later in the unit, you will find more practical lessons supporting the development of different communication documents called for in the plan. To help to put all this context, begin by becoming familiar with the Communications Package assignment.

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Circle: Communication Plant for sharing the content of the Policy Brief. Need to consider Goal, Auiden, Message and Channel.

Box 1: Infographic. Visual Fact Sheet good for sharing information

Box 2: Professional Blog. Networking tool good for spreading awareness and creating community.

Box 3: Presentation. Good for persuasive motivation to act.

Sharing Your Research

LESSON

Knowledge mobilization is, for the most part, another term for strategic communicaiton. At times, we can distinguish between strategic communicaiton that is more focused on the interests of a particular organization than in general knoweldge distribution. However, for the purposes of our course project, these concepts align. The main idea here is a strategic sharing of information (from those who create it to those who could use it) for a specific purpose, which might range from increased knowledge to generating action.

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You’ve written a Policy Brief…

Now what?

What do you have say? – What are your core messages?

Who do you need to talk to? – What groups should hear you? And why?

How will you reach out? – How can you share these messages?

Whereas the policy brief was a project in knowledge synthesis, drawing together many voices within a conversation, the communications package is a project in knowledge dissemination, getting the information out to those who need it. Developing a plan for knowledge dissemination ensures that your efforts are strategic and therefore effective.

LESSON

The OER Knowledge Management and Communication (Bruce et al., n.d., Chapter 12) cites Lavis et al.’s (2003) five fundamental questions needed to develop a plan for knowledge dissemination:

Thinking strategically about each one of these fundamental questions is key to effective dissemination of knowledge. However, taking them in isolation is not enough. The interdependence of these factors must be considered.

For simplicity’s sake, given the nature of our course project, let’s assume that the messenger stays constant—it’s you within the discourse community you connected with for the project.

We can then begin to think about the relationships of the other four factors:

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Diagram illustrating relationships between four key elements: Audience, Impact, Message, and Mechanism, arranged in two rows with bidirectional arrows connecting Audience to Impact and Message to Mechanism, and a downward arrow linking Audience-Impact pair to Message-Mechanism pair. Text below: Can design multiple iterations of this for different acts of knowledge mobilization of the same project.

An initial choice of audience will constrain subsequent choices around message and mechanism, as well as impact.

Likewise, an initial focus on a specific message taken from the larger knowledge project (in our case, the policy brief) will drive decisions around audience, mechanism, and impact. The same logic is true of impact and mechanism.

Let’s consider a simple example. You have research that demonstrates the importance of exercise in preventing disease later in life. You have not only evidence of this preventable feature of exercise, but also information on what kinds of exercise are most beneficial.

Now, imagine your options from different directions:

Working through these different thought scenarios is a way to conceptualize the interconnectedness of these four categories; when developing communication plans, it’s important to be nimble in working through these intersections to make the most effective communication.

Intent, Audience, Message, and Channel in Detail

LESSON

Defining Intent or Goal

Overall, you may have several goals to achieve in your plan for knowledge dissemination, but each communication piece should have just one. In your final course assignment, for example, you will have three individual communication pieces, and each should have a clearly defined intent; they do not have to be the same.

Consider the range of intents that might be invoked through communication:

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Diagram illustrating a four-step communication process information sharing, education or changing knowledge levels, generating affinity and goodwill, and generating action. Each step is connected by an arrow pointing to next step, highlighting progression from sharing information to prompting action.

Sometimes, our goal is simply to share information, but our goals can be progressively more persuasive, as we might be interested in our audience learning or adopting the information we share or even gaining an affinity or agreement with it, and finally, we may be interested in prompting action by our audience. The ability to achieve any one of these goals depends very much on the audience relationship to the message we have on offer; how we craft a message will depend very much on what our intent is and how the audience feels about it.

For example, we might want to share with students the date that registration opens, an intent that has no expectation of response. However, we may instead want to share this date with the intent of getting all students registered before they miss an opportunity. This intent of action requires a completely different message and possibly different mechanisms for communication.

As you develop your communication plan, think strategically about the specific intents for each communication piece.

Audience

The selection of target audience is often driven by the goal or intent of the communication, as noted in your reading. The nature of the recommendations in the policy brief and the goals for knowledge dissemination will often dictate a specific audience. However, it’s also possible that in the course of sharing research and information, opportunities come to connect with audiences that had not been anticipated. In such cases, thinking carefully about the intent and message suitable for an audience is key.

(Bruce et al., n.d., Chapter 28) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Once selected, the interests and orientation of an audience are defining elements. We need to ask the following kinds of questions:

Message

Use the questions and strategic process outlined in chapter 28 from Knowledge Management Communications (Bruce et al., n.d.) as a template for defining the message of your communication pieces; this resource reminds you to think carefully about the relationship to intent, audience, and channel when shaping your message.

A group of bowls full of food by engin akyurt on Unsplash

When working with a larger project, like a policy brief or other research project, it can be difficult to pull out threads of individual messages from the whole. Filtering information for different goals, to different people, means we need to approach our research paper flexibly without linear intent; we might think of our research as a buffet meal rather than a five-course presentation. When we write a research paper, we work carefully to tie all the pieces together in a logical and effective linear product, as you have just experienced writing the policy brief. But now, we can deconstruct this into a table of information nuggets to be selected and communicated at will. You might find, for example, a need to communicate simply the recommendations; or you might focus on a specific finding or point of research within the larger work that you want to share with a particular audience.

Mechanism or Channel

As outlined in your readings, selection of mechanism or channel is made carefully in the context of audience profile and message creation. For example, some information is better shared in some media over others, and we know this from our everyday life. Consider emergent social roles around when, what, and how to text people. Some information is more suitable for texting than other, and certain audiences respond differently to and are more adept at text messaging than others. When we get this wrong, communication can sometimes break down! Message adaptability and audience preference and competency must be considered.

The selection of mechanism or channel is also often influenced by a project’s budget and timelines. While sometimes a national ad campaign might be desirable, it’s not always feasible!

Developing the Communication Planning Document

Communication plans vary in complexity and components, as they are custom built for a wide variety of communication contexts and challenges. For example, consider this resource for information and tips on communication planning suitable for project management: “Communication Planning” (Watt, 2021).

Similarly, you can find plenty of information and templates related to the design of communication plans for campaigns or media events, such as this one from The Community Tool Box (Center for Community Health and Development, n.d.): “Developing a Plan for Communication.”

For the context of this course project, we use a simplified communication planning document, designed to have you think about the fundamental strategy needed in communication planning; you will think strategically about the relationships between impact, audience, message, and mechanism, as you plan ways to communicate content from the policy brief.

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Diagram with four quadrants as follows:

Upper Left – Text box with Match an Audience/Impact with the communicative features of each mechanism. Design the message for the audience to achieve the impact, using the best features of the mechanism.

The rest of the quadrants have similar format and are labelled 1, 2 and 3. They illustrate using different Mechaisms depending on Audience, Image, Message

Upper Right: 1: Audience, Impact, Message, Mechanism: Infographic

Lower Left: 2: Audience, Impact, Message, Mechanism: Social Media Blog

Lower Right: 3: Audience, Impact, Message, Mechanism: Slide Deck Video

Before jumping in to produce the infographic, professional blog post, and slide deck video, you must create an overall communication planning document for this knowledge mobilization, using the ideas covered in this section of the unit.

In the project, the mechanisms or channels are fixed. This gives you a starting point in beginning to plan for audience, message, and intent. Each mechanism lends itself better to some kinds of intent or goal than others. For example, the professional blog may be particularly suited to the intent to generate good will or affinity for a set of ideas, while the slide deck video, with more direct audience contact and depth, might be more suited to persuasion and a call to action. Finally, infographics, in their design, might be well suited in communicating specific messages or lessons. Each of these mechanisms also engages the audience differently, demanding various amounts of time and energy.

With these mechanisms as a guide, you can begin to define an impact, audience, and message for each of the three elements in the communications package. The unit task below will help you begin this process, and then you can continue using the template provide in the assignment.

Unit Task 6: Determine Goal, Audience, and Messages (2% of course grade)

3.2: Leveraging Principles of Visual Literacy

Translating Ideas into Images

At this point, once the strategic planning for the communications package is done and the intent, audience, and message of each communication item have been determined, it’s time to focus on the actual development of the different communication pieces.

This section introduces the idea of multimodal communication as an element of engaging storytelling. It then continues to introduce a set of techniques for leveraging strong visual literacy skills in the development of an infographic or other visual-dominant forms of communication.

Introduction to Multimodal Communication

The goal for this section is to appreciate and explore how the forms of our storytelling have a transformational impact on the content. Different forms of media can be used, leveraging their unique potential to shape, persuade, and engage an audience’s appreciation of your core messages.

LESSON

In the context of strategic communication, the question of how we tell our story, or communicate our core messages, is intricately connected to audience and goal, as we have been exploring. We can think carefully about how our choice and use of different modalities shapes how we tell these stories.

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5 modes of communication: Linguistic/Alphabetic, Visual, Aural, Gestural, Spatial

Audiences often prefer to receive different kinds of information through different modalities. Consider for a moment your own preferences. How do you prefer to get your news? How about learning new information? What about for entertainment?

How does it feel when you have to receive information in a mode that just feels wrong for the content? Ask other people in your life, including people of other generations or other areas of professional interest, these same questions. Are there different preferences?

So, from the producer’s point of view, selecting modality is a rhetorical decision, made to achieve the intended goal of the communication for the intended audiences. News today is available across a wide range of modalities to ensure the broadest possible audience, but how that news is presented varies significantly by modality, responsive to its unique features. Take a moment to track a recent news story across a newspaper, television news broadcast, and social media; how is the story shaped differently across these modalities?

Multimodal communication strategies aim to reach a broader audience not only by sending a message across multiple modalities, but also sometimes by combining modalities to make an experience richer. Consider, for example, the intersections between popular entertainment on a streaming service and the associated social media coverage inviting interactive fan participation.

When making rhetorical decisions about modality, we can consider these following tips:

Leveraging Visual Literacy

LESSON

As Niemann suggests in his talk, this cultural moment is characterized by strong visual literacy skills. Our media environment is saturated with visual information, and we are increasingly able to act as visual producers, using a range of digital tools, in ways that were not always possible in an earlier media era. Visual expression is now a normative part of our daily communication.

This literacy is a strong foundation on which to think carefully about how we use the visual mode to achieve professional and strategic communication challenges. We can begin to think about achieving our core messages across the range of modes, which requires us to consider, as noted in the readings, the unique contributions of each mode.

The use of visuals for communication, or visual rhetoric, requires the same care and attention to content, tone, and style as we would need with words. When using visuals to communicate and create meaning, we must be attentive to the cultural resonances of our visual rhetoric as well as the register or tone (formal or informal, for example). Visuals communicate quickly and often with a lot of direct impact, so nuance can be more challenging than when using words; in this sense, be mindful of the messages, both implicit and explicit, being communicated through image selection.

Using Visual Tools Effectively for an Infographic Style Document

In completing the communication planning for the infographic, strategic decisions can be made in the context of the communicative potential of this mechanism. Infographics or other visual-heavy fact sheets lend themselves well to quick and efficient consumption of information, usually a simple or really focused idea or core message. They are less suitable for a complex situation that requires persuasion for audience engagement.

Unit Task 7: Leveraging Visual Communication (2% of course grade)

3.3: Playing Speech off Text in Effective Presentations

Presentations can be difficult to pull off effectively. They are a familiar, even common, form of communication, but are rarely as engaging and effective as they can be. The first step is to have a well-organized oral delivery and some attractive supporting slides. Certainly, your resources this section will provide some tips on this. But the next step is a more difficult nuanced and cohesive relationship between the oral delivery and the visuals, playing the oral delivery and the visuals against each other for strategic purposes.

You see this done well, of course, in many TED talks—the visuals are designed not simply to reinforce or replicate the oral delivery, but often to enhance, layer meaning, and even comment on the oral delivery. If you can get this dynamic play between the modalities, you have reached something a bit more engaging.

Presentation Design Standards and Multimodal Techniques

LESSON

A presentation combines multiple modalities: audio, visual images, and written language. We’ve examined principles and techniques for written language already through this course. Let’s consider the semantic contributions of audio and visual images to any communication piece.

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Two colums of points. Left Column labelled Audio/Speech and Right Colum labelled Visual

Audio/Speech points:

• Leverage pace, pitch and rhythm
• Use space/pauses
• Play with additional audio for effect and transition
• Add intimacy of engagement/connection
• Direct attention and flow with direct engagement

Visual points:

• Create emphasis/salience
• Create perspective in relationships & importance
• Invoke deep cultural resonance
• Simplify the complexity of ideas

The creative combination of modes come together into a more meaningful whole, when done well. A presentation without visuals can sometimes be difficult to follow and salient ideas might not stand out. Effective and timely use of visuals can work to add meaning in several ways:

Consider thus ways to layer meaning in the sound/visual relationship of your design. These rhetorical choices in a presentation design should be developed with consistent use of the best practices outlined for slide deck design in the resources for this section. A successful presentation achieves the intent of the communication through the unique needs of an audience’s ability to take in the core message.

Designing the Presentation for the Course Project

When planning the slide deck presentation, make strategic decisions in the context of the communicative potential of this mechanism. The multimodal nature combines the engagement of oral delivery with the potential to communicate complex ideas with visual support. In this way, the mechanism lends itself well to both information transfer and more persuasive intents.

Consider also the various contexts and audiences that might be suitable for this type of communication. Presentations are often given in broad public settings, such as conferences or community forums, and also used widely in more internal contexts, such as organizational planning or training.

Unit Task 8: Connecting the Visual and the Oral (2% of course grade)

3.4: Leveraging Community for the Cause

In this section, we will examine two examples of professional blogs used as forms of training and advocacy. This genre, which is the final element of the communications package for this course, has become a ubiquitous means of connecting professional, social, and issues-based communities around important conversations. As such, as a tool for knowledge dissemination, it works well across a range of intent from information sharing, through engagement and affinity, to persuading action and change.

LESSON

Of course, in the broader digital environment, multiple platforms for social media engagement exist, each comprising multimodal functions that can be leveraged for strategic communication. The challenge in developing strategic communication for this environment is the sheer range and complexity of options.

In addition to the ideas presented in the readings for this unit, we can isolate some key questions to shape rhetorical decisions when working with social media; these questions will, of course, look very familiar by now, as they are related to audience, message, and intent. However, the unique features and diversity of choice within these mechanisms shapes our decision-making. The nuances of the media environment are important. Each platform, commercial or non-profit, public or private, carries a unique culture and set of functional capabilities. We intuitively know this from our own personal experiences. We know what we will find on LinkedIn compared to TikTok!

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Why do you want to be on social media?

Who is your target audience?

What are you going to share?

When are you going to share?

As with any other communication challenge, we need to find alignment between the selection of intent (the why), audience (the who), message (the what), and mechanism (the where and when). Within the social media environment, we need an extra step of differentiating an appropriate platform and combination of modes; what kind of multimodal experience would be best? This includes considering relationships between audiences and multimodal potential of different platforms, along with metrics on demographic reach of any platform.

Designing the Professional Blog

For this final piece of the communication project, many of the variables have been set for you. Professional blog posts, such as those seen on LinkedIn or other industry sites, are text heavy with some use of visuals to support and engage viewers; they are shaped for a professionally oriented context focused on networking, training, and other forms of community connectivity. These features will help you to shape the message-audience relationship for this element of the communications package.

Unit Tasks 6, 7, and 8 (6% of course grade), and Assignment 3: Communications Package (20% of course grade)

ASSIGNMENT TIME

Once you have completed Unit 3, you have the tools you need to complete Assignment 3: Communications Package.

CMNS 3241 students, please log into TRU Moodle for assignment instructions.

References