Be sure to choose the effective scale for outreach, communication, and engagement

So many earnest efforts end up with little impact because folks get the scale wrong.

I think most of us want to spend at least a little bit of our professional time to make sure that our expertise, discoveries, and capacity are used to make things better. We want to make sure that we’re not just in the field, lab, and classroom, but actually engaged with people beyond our institutions to make a difference.

I’ve seen some people do this with extraordinary levels of success. Then there those of us who are earnestly trying but aren’t quite sure if we’re having an impact. Part of this is because impact for this work tends to be hard to measure and easy to overlook if you’re more attuned to metrics like citation rates. The rewards can be huge but telling the story isn’t easy. I’ve happened to have lots of opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t work, and also to see people thriving and see people struggling to have impact.

I think a common place where people tend to stumble is finding the appropriate scale for outreach and engagement work. I think this is easy to get wrong, especially for those of us who were never trained to reach beyond the walls of our institutions.

What do I mean by scale? I mean the size of the audience that you’re trying to reach, the size of the population that you’re trying to engage with. For starters, you should intentionally develop your scope to make sure that what you’re doing will have an impact. I think people often get this wrong because it’s not easy, and because they don’t learn from other people who already have been doing similar work well. I think the world of social media makes this harder to gauge what will be most effective because there’s a temptation to use social media to simply make things bigger or reach more people, on a scale greater than where maximum impact lies.

Let me give you an example (which pushed this post to the top of the queue): I was recently on a field trip with folks from the Bureau of Land Management, where we visited some sites in the Amargosa region of the Mojave Desert. This is a spot that has some interesting hydrology, human history, and a bunch of endemic species, including some on the endangered species list. One of the sites we visited was a patch of rushes, smaller than a football field, that was adjacent to a well-visit hot spring on public land. Not too long ago, that patch of rushes was last remaining home of the endangered Amargosa vole (Microtus californicus scirpensis). While the population was at one point down to double digits, things are now looking up because of captive breeding efforts from university labs, habitat protection and restoration, and fruitful partnerships between the public agencies and the local NGOs that were working to protect the area. It required everybody to work together. One thing became clear: the reason that these efforts were successful is because the scientists working on this issue were focused at the local-to-regional scale. While the public agency was charged with compliance with the law, it was partnerships with people who were focused specifically on issues within this location that made the difference. If you’re concerned about environmental protection, biodiversity, and climate action, then engagement and advocacy at the local scale is where it can make a big difference. I see a lot of folks concerned about climate policy and environmental issues trying to impact things at the national and international scales, but really where we are needed is our towns and counties.

the patch of habitat where the recovery of the Amargosa vole happened, and some of the folks who were essential for this work

A second example: K-12 curricula and lesson plans. I’ve seen this done stunningly well but far more often, seen it done much more poorly. This all comes down to how scale is built into planning. A lesson plan that is written for everybody is effectively written for nobody. Every teacher has different needs, based on their student population, their district, state standards, budget, school priorities, and personal interests. If you’re a scientist and you think that your speciality deserves to be in the classroom of children everywhere, that means you need to convince teachers everywhere to go to the extra time and trouble to implement whatever you develop. Good luck with that. By tightening your scale, then you’ll be able to develop your work to meet the actual demonstrated needs of others. At the very least, you need to make sure that what you are doing is tightly aligned with state standards, or no public school would bother with the trouble. What you will really need to do is work specifically with partners who are excited about this work, and then will collaborate with you to package this together, with a full understanding of the audience that has already agreed to adopt it. If you don’t have a cohort of teachers and classrooms prepared to use your curriculum, then you need to refine the scale of your community so that you have these relationships ready to go. Maybe instead of developing curricula, you could engage with them to find out what the needs are, and then you can plan together to address these needs. Which more likely will involve supplies, volunteer time, outreach visits, bus funding, sub time, and stuff other than curricula.

For another example, please humor me as I talk about this newsletter and why I’m doing it. While it is a thing that is technically available to the whole world, it started for a relatively narrow audience, and I’ve been intentional about evolving the scope of the audience as the site has matured. When I started Small Pond Science 12 years ago, it was very specifically for scientists in colleges and universities who were engaged in both teaching and research, and very much with an eco/evo biology flavor. The topic was focused on being a researcher working inside a teaching focused institution. My narrowly focused goal was to burst the insular bubble of the scientific research community to recognize all the amazing things that happen in institutions that aren’t R1s. But while this history informs my work, this newsletter has evolved to become an entirely different thing, to the point where I thought taking on a new name made more sense. This place is still about being a scientist and doing science in the context of our institutions, but as the scope of the audience has grown organically along with the scope of what happens on the site. The fragmentation and enshittification of the social media environment has increased the currency value of newsletters and longer-form writing, which is what I’ve been doing all along.

Even if you’ve chosen social media, the scale of your target audience matters. If your target audience is, like, “everybody,” then it most likely will end up being nobody. But if you pick a lane and design that your approach for the community to which you’re speaking (which you can still do and be authentic and your true self), then you’re more likely to connect. The reason why individual accounts do so much better than official organizational accounts or brands is that folks connect with individuality and want to hear more from that individual. (It’s notable that orgs and brands that have done well, like the SteakUmm guy and the US Consumer Protection Bureau guy, are actual people with real flavor.) Anyhow, you’ve got to connect with the people you want to connect to. It’s social media, after all. Communication is bidirectional. Unless you have the bandwidth to interact with people on social media who are in your target population, and you take the time to do that, it’s probably not going to work out. But if your target population is people who like street art, or people who knit, or people who make fun of high falutin’ academese art museum labels, and you lean into it, you’ll be better off.