5 Evaluation Techniques To Make Your SciComm More Effective

There’s nothing more frustrating than paying for a service and later realizing that it isn’t an effective way to communicate with your particular audience. We’ve all done it at some point in our communication journeys – created content (be it written, illustrations, video, audio, or something else) and then feeling frustrated. Why isn’t it reaching the intended audience? Why is no one engaging with it? 

SciComm is Akin to a Research Experiment

Think of SciComm like it were a research experiment! You would look for research papers to know what’s out there, what experiments worked, and what experiments did not work before you start the laboratory work. Taking those results, you would plan an experiment and execute it. You would then evaluate the results. 

Our work in science communication follows a similar path. It mostly begins with using trial and error to create content that usually has low engagement levels. But it doesn’t always have to be that way. An alternative to trial and error-ing it from scratch is to understand our audience and the type of information they are looking for. You can then create content based on your findings and keep an eye out on evaluation to really drill down to a simple formula of what is working and what isn’t. 

Why Is It Important To Evaluate Your Science And Health Communications?

A good evaluation strategy will help you to consider the effectiveness of your communications. It will tell you what is working, what isn’t working, and how you can continue to make things work to your benefit. A good evaluation program will also tell you why certain things you did worked while other things didn’t work as much. 

The reasons to evaluate your scientific communications are simple – evaluation improves the effectiveness of your communications so you can reach more audiences. 

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Developing an effective evaluation plan will help you create thoughtful content that your audience is interested in. For example, does your audience want to learn more about your career or how you started your business? Or are they more interested in learning skills from you? Perhaps it’s a mixture of the two? Or perhaps you’re looking to get more visibility for your website? Evaluation can help you determine what key concepts and content your audience resonate with so you create more of this content. Evaluations build into your communications strategy. 

In communications, a one-size-fits-all strategy may work but it also has the tendency to confuse your audience. Imagine if Johnson & Johnson started creating content about mental health and wellness rather than their medical and vaccine technologies – wouldn’t that be confusing? Similarly, your brand and its audience have to be defined. The audience must then be continually be provided with related content to see high engagement stats.

Below, we provide 5 evaluation techniques that you may use to improve your science communication and health communication endeavours. 

1. Using Interviews to Evaluate Science/Health Communications

As I have mentioned in my previous post on the 7 steps to evaluate your science and health communications, I am a fan of using interviews to evaluate the success of my science communication. I frequently use it to evaluate the successes of #SciCommChat – a free Twitter chat that connects professional science communicators with each other for a weekly discussion of SciComm practices. 

An Example of How I Use Interviews for Evaluation

For the interview, I select a handful of participants in the #SciCommChat cohort and ask them targeted questions that are also open-ended. For example, I frequently ask participants about ways in which they think we can reach a wider audience, things to improve on, and also bounce ideas off them. The community of professional SciCommers helped me make decisions about the future of the chat – should we gatekeep some of it? How can it be monetized? Where to look for grants to continue providing free chats?  

2. Using Surveys to Evaluate your Science/Health Communication

Whether you are doing your SciComm online or in-person, you may wish to use surveys as a way to evaluate your comms. Personally, I would consider more yes/no type questions and “how would you rate [this] on a scale of 1 to 10?” type questions in the survey. This is mainly because when I have been asked to do surveys, I am pressed for time and end up providing very general feedback in questions that aren’t straightforward to answer. Some questions though require more. Always handy to put in a question about you can improve your talk/comms, for example. 

How to Use Surveys to Evaluate Science/Health Communication: An Example

As a good example of what you can use for your science/health comms, I figured I would enter a series of poll questions here.

This is a very basic survey, but of course, you could make it more targeted towards the information that you want to know. 

3. Observe Your Audience to Evaluate Your Science/Health Communication

Observing your audience is a great way to evaluate your science/health communication and is often used for in-person communications. It is possible to extend the application of this technique to online modes of communications including on social media and on Zoom. For this technique to work best, set out observation criteria beforehand so as to not affect your “results” with bias about how you thought the event went. In this criteria, have a structural format for the areas that you would like to analyze. In other words, be crystal clear about what it is you are measuring and how you are measuring it. 

How to Use Observation to Evaluate Your Science/Health Communication: An Example

I have never formally used this technique myself. I usually prefer to “read the room” and gauge what to say/act. But this is what it would look like when undertaken more formally: Make a list of behaviours you would like to observe in your audience and structure a format in which you can measure it. This could include things like:

• Is the audience engaging with your story/communication? Did the majority laugh when you made a joke? 
• Did your audience participate in activities? If yes, how many people participated?
• Did they show an interest in the topics? Did you get asked questions at the end of the talk? How many people asked questions?
• If the communication was in a classroom environment, did the children spend time at their desks or at activity corners?
• Was your audience focused on the talk or were they easily distracted by something else or talking to each other? 
• Were many people yawning?

Evaluate this information and leverage the information to improve your communications in line with what your audience enjoys about your content.

4. Check Social Media Insights to Evaluate Your Science/Health Communication

Social media provides you with some of the basic tools to monitor the reach and engagement of your communication activities. Using these tools, you are able to determine what type of information your audience interacts with. If you are using Instagram, you will be able to see the age groups that interact with your posts, the geographic location of your audience, and the time when they are most active. You will also be able to measure your reach: the number of accounts your posts have reached, interactions with the content, number of impressions, and the change in your follower count.

Twitter also provides you with insights and analytics you can use for your posts. On Twitter, you can learn more about the number of impressions your tweets get, the engagement with these tweets, the engagement rate relating to your tweet, profile visits, top tweets, and more. Regardless of the social media channel you use, leveraging the information that the inbuilt insights and analytics provide, offers you enough information to evaluate and find trends to understand what content performs best. You can then create and post more of that content. 

5. Website Analytics to Evaluate Your Science/Health Communication

Much like social media analysis, you can also analyze the traffic coming to your website. Currently, I use two main measures: number of views/visitors and referrers i.e. where the audience is coming from. This helps me understand whether people are finding my content from social media or search engines. These measures also provide me with information about which posts/pages are getting these views and aim to improve those when I hit a lull in terms of work. I can also see the search terms that my audience is using and learn more about where the audience is geographically. Again, leveraging all this information, I can be more effective with my communications. For example, I know which posts to update first. I know which posts are doing really well, and can decide whether or not I want to give them a boost.

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Knowing the type of content that your audience engages with, and fine-tuning future content in line with this information will help you reach a larger audience and also drive engagement rates. Evaluation makes this possible. Evaluation also helps you collect vital information that can be leveraged to shift your strategy and focus to receive maximum benefit from potential clients and audiences. To learn more about evaluation, check out our 7 step guide to evaluating the success of your science and health communications.

Most importantly, evaluation will help you allocate resources wisely. Evaluating your communications will let you know what works best and what doesn’t – based on which you can hire a freelance writer or content creator to help move things along.