Simplify your messaging with the "Kindergartener test"
Have you ever struggled to explain what you do or what public health is?
One of my colleagues has a "grandma test" for anything he communicates to a general audience - if his grandma will understand, then he can share the message. Today, I want to share another twist on that, the "Kindergartener test". Will a Kindergartener understand and stay interested and engaged in what you're saying? This requires a simple, relatable, creative, and - where possible - interactive messaging approach.
Let me share an example.
A couple weeks ago, I participated in my daughter's elementary school career fair.
Public health is pretty abstract (preventing something before it happens means there's nothing to show!) and I needed to explain it to Kindergarteners-3rd graders. Yikes.
I was momentarily stumped and walking around the house looking for a good prop to illustrate the upstream/downstream story when I came across my daughter's marble maze.
It was fun and colorful enough to draw in the kids AND - with the addition of a small round paint sponge I found - had all the elements I needed to illustrate the story.
I had the kids drop a marble in at the top and tell them to pretend it's a person going along for a walk when all of a sudden, they fall into a river. Without anything to protect them, they'd fall all the way down the river and (as the marble drops down the last ramp and off the maze) might get hurt or even drown.
BUT if there was something to protect them (enter round sponge), where might they put it to protect the person?
Some kids suggested putting the sponge on the first ramp to prevent the person from going downstream, or at the entrance to the maze to prevent the person from falling in at all. These are the ideas I originally had as well - and when kids said this, we got to do it, see how the marble stopped at the sponge, and talk about how "that protects the person BEFORE they get hurt or sick, which is exactly what we do in public health!".
But the best part were the other ideas kids came up with that hadn't occurred to me at all.
Some kids suggested putting the sponge on the floor below where the last ramp ended to cushion the person's fall. So I said, "That's such an interesting idea, and you're absolutely right, that would cushion the person's fall, but they might not land right on it or they might get hurt anyway. But where else could we put the sponge if we didn't want them to fall at all?" This would prompt them to suggest putting the sponge somewhere further upstream.
Others suggested putting an extra marble on the opposite side of the green entrance to the maze, which meant even if the marble person in question began the maze, they would never get tilted down into the blue "stream", because the extra marble acted as a counterweight - a true systems solution!
A few kids got so excited about the marble maze, they dropped several marbles in at once - the sponge stopped all of them, and I explained how that's how public health solutions work too, once you put them in place, they protect MANY people at once.
None of these ideas had occurred to me beforehand and they all allowed me to have a meaningful conversation with these smart and thoughtful young kids about public health. I loved every minute of it.
The thing is, simple, relatable, creative, and interactive messaging isn't just helpful for Kindergarteners and grandmothers, it's helpful for everyone.
When you're trying to get an entire community on board with pursuing prevention and public health, you're communicating to a wide range of people with a wide range of existing experiences and understanding - this kind of messaging can help you reach more of them.
Also important to consider is that policy changes that support public health are rarely possible without widespread community support - and community support for public health requires an understanding of what public health is and why it works. This was the motiviation behind my talk on the topic a couple years ago, and I hope we see a true understanding of public health spread more widely in the years to come.
Have you had success with simple, relatable, creative, interactive messaging in your work to transform health in communities? Or is there a message you're struggling to communicate in this way? Tell me all about it!
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