TAcommunities

Dissemination is an evidence-based craft whose bottom line, always, must be understandability and utilization. Implicit in this bottom line are attendant questions: Understandable to whom? Utilized by whom? How? To what purpose?

Only users can effectively answer these questions. The large body of research on dissemination is replete with this same message, stressing again and again that, to be effective, dissemination must:

• come from a source the user finds credible;

• involve collaborative problem solving and exchange between disseminator and recipient;

• utilize a social marketing perspective and design (which is strongly user-oriented);

• embed in its process a multi-way dialogue and social components to engage, motivate, and support the recipient in utilization; and

• be tailored to fit user need, culture, and local context.

The last point, tailoring, speaks directly to dissemination’s bottom line, especially to understandability. Understandability hinges on the degree to which information is attuned to a user’s reality and is seen by the user as relevant and applicable. “User reality” has become as complex as our society itself, varying along such dimensions as ethnicity, culture, native language or mode of communication, reading ability, disability, SES, and technological savvy.

Consider the sheer numbers of people affected by just two of these, literacy and language:

• 50 million adults can’t read as well as a 4th or 5th grader; 42 million can’t read at all.

• 13.8 million Spanish speakers do not speak English well.

• Neither do 3.4 million speakers of Indo-European languages (e.g., German, Italian, Russian) nor 3.6 million speakers of Asian-Pacific Island languages (e.g., Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean).

There are specific ways to craft and present information that supports diverse users in accessing, understanding and applying it, including:

• adhering to the principles of universal design;

• writing in plain language;

• defining terms;

• activating or providing any prerequisite knowledge;

• making translations available;

• offering the same information in a different format (e.g., audio); and

• providing users with opportunities for exchange and dialogue with each other and with your center.

Dissemination needs to be conducted in the same user-driven way. Dissemination cannot be “broad-spectrum” approaches to “everyone at once” but must favor dissemination to specific audiences, via the entities they trust and the vehicles they typically use.