Welcome person who wants to share something with others.
I created this guide because I disliked pretty much every resource I could find about dissemination. I think they teach you the wrong way to do things simply because it sounds right. But sounding right and being right are not the same thing.
Everybody is welcome here, but I’m assuming you’re probably some kind of academic, researcher, evaluator, scientist, public health worker, or some other type of highly educated person. You might not be, but that’s who I had in my mind when putting this together. Because most other people don’t use the word dissemination, they just talk about sharing stuff, comms, or marketing.
Five basic rules before we begin.
Rule #1: Everybody is overwhelmed.
This is your boss, the people you think might be interested in what you have to share, the people who are not interested but you think should be interested in your work, etc. This also includes me and you. Humans have never had as much access to information as they do right now, and it is messing with our brains.
Rule #2: No audience is a monolith.
There is no one perfect way to disseminate anything because every person we are attempting to reach is unique. We group people together based on similar characteristics because we don’t have unlimited time, and for sanity reasons.
Rule #3: The status quo predates the internet.
The way most orgs disseminate right now mimics the way organizations disseminated before the web. And the most used digital format, the PDF, came out in 1993, before Social Media, before YouTube, before Wikipedia, and even before Google.
Rule #4: Dissemination is work.
Most orgs just assume dissemination happens at the end of the research/evaluation/resource development process. Or people assume that the comms team has it under control. But often it’s neither. Effective dissemination only happens when there is intent, someone with the skills necessary to follow through, and an actual dissemination budget.
Rule #5: Every choice you make decides who you reach and who you exclude.
Most exclusion is unintentional but it’s still an outcome of our choices. The format you pick, the platform you post to, the reading level you write at — each one opens a door for some people and closes it for others.
Step 1. Starter Questions
There are three simple questions I want you to keep asking yourself throughout the dissemination process.
- Question 1. Who are you trying to reach?
- Question 2. Who do you actually reach?
- Question 3. Who do you exclude?
I know that third question feels odd, we generally like to stay positive and talk more about increasing inclusion or accessibility. But that lets us off the hook. The decisions that we make during the dissemination process don’t just affect who is included, they can also exclude and often do.
For example, let’s say you are part of an association doing field building work and would like to reach your peers. With this in mind you may plan to write a journal article and present at a large national conference.
- Who are you trying to reach?
Your peers. - Who do you actually reach?
Anyone that reads your journal article or attends your talk. - Who do you exclude?
All the people who don’t have access to the journal, read journal articles, or are able to attend a national conference. This is a lot of people.
Now let’s say you hope to reach the same audience, but this time you plan to write a journal article, adapt that journal article into a easier to read illustrated blog post, present at a large national conference, and deliver your talk as a webinar. You’ll also upload the webinar recording to YouTube.
- Who are you trying to reach?
Your peers. - Who do you actually reach?
Anyone that reads your journal article, finds your blog post via Google, attends your talk, attends your webinar, or finds your webinar recording on YouTube. - Who do you exclude?
People outside your network who don’t happen upon your work. There are still a lot of people here, but far less than the previous approach.
Bottom line, conferences and journal articles are opportunities to reach very specific audiences. But limiting your dissemination to those channels will exclude far more than you reach.
Google chrome will auto-translate a simple blog post into 249 languages (as of April 2026). YouTube auto-transcribes subtitles and can auto-translate those subtitles into more than 130 languages. They are even expanding auto-dubbing technology and can currently turn English into 20 different spoken languages.
As for time required. Adapting a full journal article into a blog post is something any AI chat tool can do in under a minute. You can even make the webinar part easy. Just treat it like a practice session before the conference, invite a few colleagues, and just make sure to hit the record button in Zoom.
Step 2. My Five Audience Framework
Let’s say you’re a program evaluator working in education. There is a big difference between sharing a report with the superintendent of a school district, teachers in that district, parents of the students in that district, and the government department that commissioned the evaluation.
Each audience should be approached differently, but it’s also easy to get carried away and overwhelmed. So I’ve broken my dissemination approach down into five distinct audience categories.
If you actually want to reach these audiences, each audience category should have its own dissemination strategy. I know that sounds like a lot, but remember, dissemination is work. It doesn’t have to be complicated or require fancy tools, but it does take intention, time, and effort to do properly.
Audience 1. The Client
The people who pay the bills.
Every project has someone holding the purse strings — a funder, a boss, a commissioner. They need accountability, completeness, and defensibility. They are almost always your primary audience by default, even if you pretend otherwise.
This audience is usually fine with the basics, a clean visual pdf report, a traditional executive summary, and a clear presentation. They may even want a long technical report, even if they don’t plan to actually read it. Serving this audience above everyone else is one of the reasons our resources seem so inaccessible.
Audience 2. The Community
Our work takes a village.
These are the people closest to the work — research participants, program staff, partner organizations, community members whose lives and experiences generated your findings. They have a claim on the work that no other audience does, but they’re often the least served.
Reaching this audience requires going to them and not waiting for them to come to you. Use conversational methods like newsletters, blogs, webinars, and in-person events. We have an ethical responsibility to report back to the people who gave us their time, feedback, and experiences. Because at the end of the day, it’s their data not ours.
Audience 3. The Influencers
Our work is often inherently political.
Community leaders, policymakers, decision-makers — the people who could actually act on your findings. They’re busy, skeptical, and driven by decisions they’re already trying to make. If we want our work to bring change, this is an audience we need to reach effectively.
Format matters less than timing and relationships. The best policy brief in the world is worthless if it arrives after the vote. Sometimes the relationships are direct and other times they are indirect. Develop things like adaptable PowerPoint presentations and briefs. Also try to focus on highlighting interesting charts or quotes that can be used for sound bites.
Audience 4. The Peers
Our work can be field-building at times.
Other researchers, evaluators, and practitioners doing work like yours. Sharing with this audience isn’t just professional obligation — it’s contributing to a body of knowledge that makes everyone’s work better. Given that so many of us have higher degrees, it’s also an audience we’ve been trained to serve.
Journal articles and conference presentations are the norm, and often important, but only sharing in these formats keeps the ivory tower locked up tight. If you’re serious about reaching this audience I suggest adding blog posts, webinars, and YouTube to the mix. Also lots of associations have their own community blogs these days or host public facing webinars.
Audience 5. The Public
When our work has public implications.
The broadest and most uncertain audience. Not every project warrants a public audience — and pretending otherwise wastes effort and oversells findings. But when your work genuinely affects people’s lives, connects to something they already care about, or challenges a widely held assumption, this audience deserves a real strategy. Not a PDF link on a resource page.
The best way to reach a public audience is to follow the strategies developed over decades and modeled by data journalists. This includes writing article style reports, lots of illustration, a touch of interactivity, and starting with the most interesting parts of your findings. Think Pew Research and the NY Times with their HTML first formats, scrollytelling articles, social media friendly charts and infographics, short reads, and social media carousels.
What about <insert audience here>?
You could easily make the case for some other major audience types to be included here. But I had to stop somewhere. You don’t have to. If you think a specific audience should be reached, create your own dissemination strategy for that audience.
Step 3. Develop Your Dissemination Plan and Choose Your Methods.
I consider a dissemination strategy to be a mix of methods used to reach a specific audience. The methods you choose should depend on the audience you hope to reach and the three Cs.
- Context – Is your org risk-averse, innovative, or somewhere in-between?
- Capability – What specific skills and strengths does your team possess?
- Capacity – How much time and effort are you willing to invest?
There are four general types of methods.
- Process Methods – Things you do that make other things possible.
- Product Methods – How to create actual stuff to share.
- Sharing Methods – The ways you get your stuff to other people.
- Evaluation Methods – How you see if your strategy is working so you can course correct.
This section is going to be developed over time as I create individual method pages. Each page will include a simple description of the method along with a set of basic steps. The page will also link you to related resources and examples if you would like to dive deeper.
Method Pages [Coming Soon]
Process Methods
- Dissemination Plan
- Dissemination Budgeting
- Moodboarding
- Storyboarding
- Storytelling – SCR Approach
Product Methods
- Simple 1 Pager
- Simple 3 Pager
- Micrographic
- Interactive Charts
- 25 Page SlideDoc
- Social Media Carousel
- Single Panel Comics
- HTML Executive Summary Landing Page
- HTML Article Style Report
Sharing Methods
- Audience Borrowing
- Newsletter Writing
- Audience Magnets
- Social Objects
- LinkedIn Strategy
Evaluation Methods
- Google Analytics
- Search Analytics
- Social Media Analytics
- Newsletter Analytics
- UX Evaluation
- Page Recording
Step 4. When to Start and Stop Disseminating.
When to start.
In my dreams dissemination happens in parallel with the work. As soon as you start your project, you also start a blog and/or a newsletter. Then, as you have interesting things and products to share, you share them.
But in reality most orgs really only think about dissemination at the proposal stage and then again at the end of the project. For these organizations dissemination really only starts after the work exists in some completed or near-completed form, which is usually a technical report or guide.
When to stop.
There is a quote by Paul Valéry that goes like this, “un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé . . . mais abandonné.” Or, in English, “a work is never completed…but abandoned.”
There is another quote attributed to Andy Warhol, “You know it’s Art, when the check clears.”
Formally, dissemination stops when we run out of budget or the website goes down. Informally, it stops when we run out of energy.
Best case, it stops when we feel like we’ve done a decent job of delivering our work into the hands of people who can get the most value from what we have to share. Worst case, it stops when we get discouraged or burnt out.
Some words of encouragement.
Our work needs champions for it to spread.
Right now there is a gap between the technical products developed by research and evaluation teams and the sharing done by most org comms teams. Because dissemination usually happens at the end of a project, the expert team behind the work is often ready to move onto the next thing. The comms team is the face of an organization, responsible for building and serving the org’s audience.
There is rarely sufficient budget or time dedicated to dissemination budgets. Usually it’s tied in directly with technical report writing, technical report copyediting, and technical report graphic design. By the time all of that is done, the budget is drained and the contract is in its last days. At the moment it should ramp up, it fizzles out.
So we get what we pay for. Millions of dollars put into research and evaluation that is likely archived but never adequately shared.
For the people who really care, it can be discouraging. That’s me, and I’m guessing you because you made it this far. But while the effort you put in during a time when everyone else is checking out is often thankless, it’s not futile. Little bits of process improvement here and there can have a huge impact on who gets to see our work and who gets excluded.
I believe in you. Now go share some stuff.