A 7-Step Guide To Evaluating The Success Of Your Science And Health Communications

I have previously written about ways in which you can improve your science communication skills. Below, I provide a step-by-step guide on how to evaluate your science and health communications effectively.

To learn more about the different ways in which you can improve your science and health communication skills, check out my previous post here. As you will see from my post, one of the major ways to improve your communications is to ensure you are effectively evaluating your science and health communications. Evaluation should not be an afterthought. Where possible, you should think about ways to evaluate your project before you begin the project, during the project, and even after the project.

The 7 steps listed below can be used to evaluate scientific communications, public health communications, patient communications in healthcare, and medical communications. 

1. Define your goals (including what you will evaluate)
   
   For your science and health communications to be successful, you need to define the goal of your communications. This could be something simple like “raising awareness of the COVID-19 vaccines to drive behavioral change i.e. encourage more people to receive their COVID-19  vaccines” – these were my goals during the pandemic.
   
   Regardless of what your goal is, it needs to be specific so that you can measure your success against it. Your goal could be something that takes science further. What do I mean? Your goal could focus on raising awareness of COVID-19 and ensuring it translates to change in policy. 
   
   Your goal could also be short-term focusing on increasing the visibility and reach of your communications. In any case, it is important that you have a goal so that you can work towards it. 

2. Set incremental objectives that help you achieve your goal.
   
   You can set your objectives in an incremental manner that leads up to your goals. Using #SciCommChat as an example:
   
   Objective one for #SciCommChat includes speaking to the SciComm audience to find out what they want to know/what type of content they would like to engage with. I found people within communications love speaking to each other and learning from each other. This made me start #SciCommChat – there was nothing like this out on the internet for professional communicators in science and health. 
   
   Objective two #SciCommChat was to focus on creating the content that the audience asks for. In the case of the chat, it refers to finding topics that people would not only like to know about but would also like to engage with. All the chats to date have seen success in engagements from the audience – however, some chats have higher engagement rates than others. The objective here, helps me find what works and what doesn’t. It helps me pinpoint the sort of conversations people like having. 
   
   Objective three for #SciCommChat refers to using objectives one and two (listed above) to increase the reach and visibility of the account among other like-minded individuals within the field of professional science communicators over the year. 
   
   The final goal: I had multiple goals based on the objectives listed above. The first was to encourage awareness of the work that science communicators do – to advance policy, change attitudes, secure funding, and more. The second was more self-serving- to use the three objectives in a SMART manner and leverage the chats to create content and also to find more clients (gotta pay those high London city bills).
   
   Do these goals remind you of a positive feedback loop? That’s the point! I recommend that you use the SMART method on your objectives (and goals). Ensure they are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Result-focused, and Time-specific. I understand it is difficult to tick all the SMART boxes, but the more criteria your objectives tick, the more likely you are to be able to focus on the goal and achieve it. 

3. Identify your audience
   
   The best science and health communication incorporates thought into the target audience. If you don’t know which audience to target your communications to, your comms strategy would be nightmarish. For example, if you are looking to target children in your communications, you need to use bright colours and easy-to-understand language. Similarly, if you are looking to market alternatives to traditionally used breast milk, you are most likely going to focus your marketing towards individuals with children rather than all adults (because some adults don’t have children).
   
   As you will see from the above examples, you need to identify your audience to be able to target your communications towards them. What works for one or more groups of individuals may not necessarily work for everyone under the sun. To ensure you are communicating to your target audience efficiently, make sure you know exactly who you’d like as a customer/client. Consider what they are looking for, what information is helpful to them, and how you can best communicate with them. In other words, figure out your target market and buyer persona.
   
   To spell things out further, my ideal prospect (or buyer persona) is a company looking to build awareness around the sciences and health. More specifically, I would like to help clients reach new audiences to encourage health literacy in more people globally. My ideal clients would include pharmaceutical companies and medical device companies as well as healthcare charities and start-ups within the life sciences niche. 

4. Set criteria for your success
   
   Setting your criteria for success will help you figure out whether or not you are being “successful” with your science and health communication. Perhaps you just started a new Instagram account to encourage science and health literacy – this means you start from an audience of 0. Would you consider yourself successful if you have 1 follower or 100 followers? What if you have 100 followers but none of them engage with your content? Maybe a lot of people save the content – is this success to you? Set the criteria for your success so you can measure your success. In marketing, these criteria are called key performance indicators (or KPIs). 

5. How are you evaluating your SciComm?
   
   Now that you have identified your goals, your objectives, and your audiences, and set criteria for success, it is important to think about how you are going to evaluate your science and health communications. As you probably have gathered, there are so many ways in which you can do this. 
   
   For example, you could evaluate your communications through qualitative ways like a feedback/evaluation form or a survey. You could also evaluate the success of your communications by “reading the room” i.e. taking quick notice of whether people seemed happy from your comms or if they were confused and agitated after you complete your communication. You could also consider having interviews and observation schedules using which you can identify the successes of your communications.
   
   Your communications can also be evaluated in quantitative ways. This could refer to the number of people that engage with your content, the number of “likes” you get on your posts on social media, the number of visitors that come to your website, and if you are conducting in-person communication, the number of people that return to the next session.
   
   Personally, I use interviews, observations, and focus groups to measure and evaluate my communications qualitatively. I also use engagement metrics, website traffic, and backlinks to measure my success quantitatively. 

6. Collect your data and analyze it to measure your success
   
   Using your qualitative and quantitative measures from step 5, you can collect the data overall and analyze it to measure your success. All of these data points provide you with information that you can evaluate to understand what went well and what requires more improvement.
   
   From your strategy, you may recognize that some content gets more engagement than others. For example, “how-to” blog posts (such as this one) fair well – they get high levels of engagement, a higher number of shares, and are also more likely to rank on search engines. Based on this information, and the rates of engagement, you can provide your audience with more blog posts of this type.
   
   As a rule of thumb, don’t aim to only create “how-to” content. Try and find out other areas in which your content is helpful and create that too. Perhaps you haven’t quite figured out how to make your other content stand out – use evaluations to learn how you can make this content better and find a formula that works for you. Super niche content may not bring in thousands of searchers, but they might bring in high levels of expert audiences that lead to paid work. Analyzing your data will provide you with these insights on what works and what needs more work.

7. Leverage your findings to implement actionable insights
   
   Using the data you have collected so far you can understand and monitor the progress of your science and health communications. More specifically, you can identify your successes and failures at each milestone and objective to optimize your processes and content towards your final goal – whatever it may be. You can leverage these findings to carry out actionable insights that improve future communication projects. 
   
   These insights can also be used to figure out time and budget constraints including where to make hires including for social media content, website content, general freelance writing within the life science and healthcare niche, or even for creating graphics and illustrations. 

Related posts:

Want To Improve Your Science Communication Skills? Here Are Some Quick Tips From A Breast Cancer Scare To A Career in Science And Health Communication 5 Evaluation Techniques To Make Your SciComm More Effective What Is Science Writing And Scientific Content Marketing [With Examples]? Getting Started In SciComm: Insights From 10+ Professionals