Dissemination Toolkit: Guide to Product Dissemination

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12 Questions to Guide a Product-Driven Dissemination Strategy

If you have a resource, activity, event, or project milestone that you would like to disseminate, use the guiding questions below to help you devise a plan.

Dissemination Strategy Workbook

Use this Excel worksheet to map out the specifics of your product dissemination plan, including audience-tailored strategy elements; resources required to implement the those strategies, and measures of success.

Click the orange buttons (below) to access resources. Note: These steps do not need to be followed in the order that they are written below, depending on where you are in your work.10 Steps for Developing a Product-Driven Dissemination StrategyStep 1: What is the product, event, or milestone? Identify the specific product (e.g., a book, event, activity, or milestone) you are focusing on. If it is a suite of products, determine if they are a package or if you need to create a separate dissemination plan for each product.  Step 2: Who is your audience? Consider the audience(s) your product is intended to reach or impact. Step 3: What is the purpose of communication?What is the desired outcome of your outreach? Are you asking the audience to take an action (e.g., register for an event)? Are you sharing information? Are you increasing awareness? Are you promoting a product? Are you relationship building or networking?  Step 4: What is the message? Based on your purpose of communication and your intended audience, determine the best way to frame your product. Ask yourself, “How do I make it relevant to them?”Step 5: What is the method of communication? Brainstorm different ways to reach out to your audience(s), such as by direct email, blog, infographic, podcast, social media post, website announcement, workshop, video, or all of the above.Media Interviews Icon Presentations Icon Social Media Icon Video & Podcasts Icon Visualizations Icon Webinar Icon Websites Icon Writing & Publishing IconStep 6: Is your product accessible? Determine whether your website, PDF, Word doc, infographic, or video are 508 compliant, and fix any issues that you find.  Step 7: What is the timeline for dissemination? Plan out a communications timeline to maximize impact, circumvent workload bottlenecks, and avoid overwhelming your audience with too much information at once.Step 8: Who is responsible for communications? This may be one person or it may be a team of people, depending on your dissemination method(s). For example, one person could be responsible for crafting emails, while another person is creating an infographic.  Step 9: Who can help you disseminate? Brainstorm people (e.g., fellow researchers, journalists, bloggers), networks (e.g., CADRE), and/or organizations (e.g., NSF, NSTA, AERA, NCTM) that would be interested in sharing your product, event, activity or milestone.Step 10: Don't be afraid to share more than once! While you should never overwhelm your audience with messages, they may have missed your first communication.  Send an “in case you missed it” email or repost on social media.  Step 11: How will you know you're successful? Before you launch your product, set targeted goals (e.g., number of product downloads, email open rates, video views, etc.) by XX date for each of your communications so that you can evaluate your success. Step 12: Evaluate and Identify successful strategies. After a period of time (set in Step 11), evaluate whether you reached your targeted goal(s). Revise your next dissemination strategy based on what you learned (what worked? what didn’t work?).