Relationships

What is the context of your message and what does it mean for your target audience? Many people, institutions and companies have a tendency to want to broadcast their own message, while it is often more effective to seek interaction with those you want to reach. Not “We do great research. Just so you know.” But “We do fantastic research. We will solve a problem in your life. Come talk to us, or even better: help us do even better research.”

Think not only about your own message, but also about why your target audience should listen to it.

Attention

You increase the attention of your audience when you tell a story. For example with an ‘And, But, Therefore‘ structure. Randy Olson is a marine biologist turned filmmaker. In 2015, he wrote the book Houston, We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs Story. He advocates the use of the dramatic scheme And, But, Therefore, to make a scientific text exciting and easy to read. Of course, it also works for non-scientific texts. In the review of the book on the SciComNL website, you will find examples.

News First

The guiding principle of journalism is to find answers to the questions who, what, where, when, why and how. Combined with the ‘wow’ or ‘goh’ moment. Don’t start texts with an extensive introduction, but formulate to-the-point and answer as many of the 5 W’s as possible and as quickly as possible so the reader can determine whether it is worth reading the rest of the text.

You can even use the five w’s to determine a good content strategy.

Know your goal

Determine your goal, target audience, message and communication tools. These are the four basic ingredients for any communication strategy, it is Communication 101. Without answers to these questions, you cannot begin.

• Objective: what do you want to achieve?
• Target audience: who exactly do you want to reach? The word ‘exactly’ already indicates that ‘the general public’ is not a helpful answer to this question.
• Message: what exactly do you want to tell them and how will they benefit from this message?
• Communication means: which means (social media, press release, infographic, opinion piece, personal meeting) can you best use?

No-no

Jargon or meaningless clichés, it is best not to use them. An example of a cliché is “In our company, service and quality are of paramount importance”. I don’t think there is a company in the world that doesn’t value service and quality. What makes your company distinctive? In addition, every field has its own terms, jargon. Using these terms is not always a bad thing, but consider whether the recipient of your message is familiar with the terms. If not, explain what they mean.

Use visuals

You make a story livelier by making it visual or using metaphors. It is a cliché, but no less true: a picture can say more than a thousand words.

The use of metaphors in science is centuries old. Galileo, Descartes, Boyle and Newton imagined the world as a predictable machine. Darwin and Einstein even considered metaphors essential for developing scientific ideas. The brain can be imagined as a computer. The atom and the electrons circling it can be imagined as our solar system. Electricity is like water: current flows like water, voltage is the pressure on that water and resistance is the thickness of the pipe it flows through.