You finished your study and you have your results. We now need to consider how to explain the results so that people are able to interpret them in a way that is relevant to them - what is the story?
We need to distill the complexity of our research into a message that’s meaningful for who we want to reach.
In general, the best is to have your message be as long as necessary but as short as possible. One approach I have been using is the Message Box developed by Nancy Baron, the communications specialist at COMPASS. The approach focuses on putting yourself in the perspective of your desired audience, and relate your findings to problems they encounter and actions they might take based on your findings. When considering the message, it can often help to try to think back to why you decided to study this question in the first place.
Reaching your audience usually requires an emotional connection. You want them to be surprised, fascinated, shocked, excited, all of the above, so they engage with your message. So it is important to consider how people might react to your message. The same facts can be interpreted in very different ways. That partly depends on the background of your audience, so you might want to consider to focus on aspects that are likely shared even by people who come from a very different perspective.
Here is an exercise for considering the emotional connection and different ways to interpret the same observation: the kitchen call. The exercise has you imagining yourself in the living room, while your partner is busy in the kitchen. You come across your study, and go ‘wow’. So obviously your partner wants to know what got you excited, so you shout across what got you excited in one sentence. The exercise focuses on the idea that you don’t want to simply summarize your findings, but get across what you want people to remember about your study.
One alternative approach to finding your message I have been taking is trying to visualize the key aspects. For this, you could use photos, drawings, or graphics. Visualizing a message usually forces you to focus on the key points and is often also linked to an emotional reaction. Even if you use a different approach to identify your key message, it is always useful to include visuals as part of your press release and outreach.
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For our male infanticide study, we used some photos of species that represent particular situations in which either male strategies or female counter-strategies appear to be effective. For the counter-strategies, we found that females protect offspring from infanticide by forcing males to compete through sperm instead of violence. The intensity of sperm competition is shown by this male grey mouse lemur. Please note: the animal in the photo was handled as part of a research project, with all relevant permits, and released immediately after. They are not pets. |
Now that you have identified your key message and what you want people to take away from your study, find out in part 3 how convey this information within the format of the press release.