"You Cannot Use These Graphics:" A Story About Audience Expertise

In this episode, we’re sharing a recording of a conference talk where Tracy tells the story behind a firearm safer storage campaign. Her message: subject matter expertise is not the same as audience expertise, and effective health messaging needs both. 

You’ll hear how bringing in a reviewer who understood the audience context changed the campaign materials, strengthened trust, and helped the message reach people who might otherwise tune out. Tracy also digs into the communication skills that actually move behavior: listening, humility, and inviting communities to shape solutions from the beginning, not just react at the end.

Listen to us break down this talk in Episode 15.

Graphics: https://www.t4cip.org/safer-storage

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Note: all thoughts and opinions shared in this podcast are personal and not representative of any organization.

Transcript

Why Share A Conference Talk

Tracy 0:10

Welcome to Communications Breakdown, where we break down what works and doesn't in health and science communication. I'm Tracy Mehan, and it's just me here for this episode to introduce what you're going to hear because this episode is a little different. You're going to hear a recording of a talk I recently gave at an in-person conference. If you listen to episode 15, you already heard us break down the strategy and decisions that went into building the presentation, but the talk itself is about a completely different topic. We decided to release the full recording here for two reasons. First, so that people who listened to the previous episode could hear the finished version. And second, because we felt the message of the talk itself is important for those who communicate about research and science. This talk tells the story of a firearm safe storage campaign that changed the way I think about expertise, trust, and audience engagement. And it really comes down to one main idea that subject matter expertise is not the same as audience expertise, and effective communication requires both. Let's listen in on the recording, and I hope you enjoy it.

Recorded Conference Talk

Tracy 1:38

I wanted to start by saying that for my talk today I'm not going to be using any slides. For those of you that know me, you know this is a really big deal. I am usually the one with lots of slides and visuals. But today, I wanted the story to do the work, not the screens behind me. Today I want to share a lesson I learned from a campaign I worked on. And honestly, I think it's one that our field needs to hear. To put the story in context, I want to start with a quick exercise. Imagine that you've spent months helping organize a one-day national campaign related to firearms. You have partners across the United States posting on social media, holding in-person events, and leading trainings. You're 30 minutes away from hosting a live webinar with hundreds of people registered. And then you get a notification that a Second Amendment group has put out a video about your campaign and urged fellow patriots to join your webinar. Oh, and it's October 2021. How are you feeling right now? What emotions come up for you? When I tell this story, I hear gasps many times. For me, the first reaction was terror, panic. Oh no, what's this gonna look like? What are they gonna do? Are we ready? But then I took a deep breath and I thought about the campaign we had built and I felt something else. Cautious hope. Why hope? Because by that point, we'd learned something really important. Expertise in the data is not the same as expertise in real-world context. And if we want our messages to work, we need both. To see how we learned this, let's go back to the beginning. We knew we wanted to address the rising number of firearm injuries among children and teens in the United States. So we started the way that many of us do. We reviewed the literature, we conducted an environmental scan of existing resources, policies, and policy statements. We talked with people across organizations to figure out an angle that institutions would support and that gun owners might be also open to hearing. We decided to focus on safer storage of firearms. As part of the campaign, we created a series of social media graphics. Some shared data, some offered parents language that they could use to ask whether there were guns unlocked in a home that their child was visiting. And some focused on what safer storage actually looks like. And that's where we ran into trouble. The recommendations were clear. Firearms should be stored unloaded, locked, up and away and out of sight and separately from ammunition. But my team didn't grow up around guns. I didn't, our graphic designer did not. No one on our team did. So when we started creating the visuals to show what safer storage actually looked like, we realized pretty quickly that we had questions that we couldn't answer. What does it actually look like to store ammunition separately? Does that mean two safes? If a safe is large, can ammunition be inside it? If it's in a separate locked container, what kind of setup would actually look normal and credible to a gun owner? We didn't know. And even finding stock images was hard. Most stock photos were unrealistic or stereotyped. For real, the stock images made it seem like if a gun owner, you must be somebody who is really good at jewel heists. So many pictures of safes that had multiple passports, stacks of cash, and outrageous jewels. Seriously, though, we struggled to find images that showed what safe storage of firearms actually looks like in real life. So we had to create some of the visuals ourselves. But we still had questions that we didn't know how to answer. So we reached out to experts in firearm injury prevention research and messaging. We asked them our questions and we asked them to review our draft graphics. And what we found surprised me. Many, if not most, were not gun owners either. They gave us helpful feedback, but they could not fully answer the real world questions that we were asking. And that left me a little unsettled because the evidence was there, the recommendations were there, but knowing the evidence and knowing how to communicate it in ways that would actually land and be usable to the audience turned out to be two different things. And then I heard Cass Crifassi speak about her work in the space. And she mentioned that she was also a gun owner. So I reached out and asked whether she would be willing to answer our questions. And thankfully, she agreed. We sent her the graphics, and remember, these were materials that had already been reviewed by experts. And she came back almost immediately and said, you can't use these. Yikes. She told us that the safes pictured were not the kind of safes that people would actually use with the guns that were being shown. The cable lock was not on the right way, and so on. And then she told us something that has really stayed with me. She said that any gun owner looking at those graphics would know right away that they had been created by people who did not own guns and that they wouldn't take the message seriously. That hit me hard. We had done our research. The graphics had been reviewed by experts, and no one had caught those issues. And that was the moment that I realized that we had confused subject matter expertise with audience expertise. The evidence was there, but we were still not communicating it in a way that would connect. Cass spent time helping us revise the images so they were accurate, realistic, and credible. And did it matter? Let's go back to the exercise we did at the beginning of this talk. It's 30 minutes before our webinar, and we have just found out that a Second Amendment group has released a video about our campaign and is urging people to attend. I found their video and watched it. He was calling on his audience to join our webinar because, in his words, we had gotten the message right. He said we were talking about how people can keep their families safer in their own homes and that they needed to listen to our recommendations. It was one of the moments when I was most proud of the work my team had done. And not because everyone suddenly agreed on everything, but because we had created something that people could actually see themselves in and trust. It took more time and it took being willing to hear that we had gotten it wrong. What I have learned again and again since then is this people want to feel heard and seen. I cannot tell you how many times I've watched community groups express surprise when we actually invite them to the table. Not just to react to what we've already built, but to help shape it from the beginning. We have to talk about what they want to hear, not just what we want to say. We have to understand the barriers people face in following our guidance and not just repeat the guidance louder. We have to listen to what real life looks like and work with people to find solutions that fit that reality. Because communication that leads to change requires more than accuracy. It requires listening. It requires humility. It requires bravery. And it requires something that people have a it requires acknowledging that people have a lot going on in their lives. And sometimes it requires risk. There's a quote that I often think about from Andy Goodman. No one ever marched on Washington because of a pie chart. Data tells us what is happening. But if we want our work to lead to change, we have to make that data meaningful in people's real lives. Because expertise in the data is not the same as expertise in the real world context. And neither one is the same as knowing how to bridge the two. I hope that after hearing this talk today, you will broaden your definition of expertise, because public health needs not only the people who generate the evidence, but also the people who understand the audience and the people who know how to connect the two. Thank you.

What To Do Next

Tracy 10:25

Thanks for listening. I wanted to share this talk because the experience taught me a lot about humility, about listening, and about what can happen when you're willing to rethink your messaging. It also really changed the way I think about expertise and who needs to have a seat at the table when we're creating health and science communications. If you want to hear more about how this talk came together, check out episode 15 where Katrina and I break down this process and the strategy behind it. And don't forget to subscribe so you get notified when new episodes come out. Until next time.