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How to Add Feedback Loops to the Content Creation Process to Avoid Future Communications Gaps
Enable a Communications Staffer to Work alongside CBOs and Trusted Messengers to Regularly Create and Amplify Content
A direct link between a state official and community leaders is a great way of ensuring that content is always up to date, especially under quickly changing circumstances. Fast feedback loops also enable an efficient response to unwanted misinformation and indirectly strengthen the bonds between the government and its public.
For us, fast feedback loops between video creators and our team enabled our creators to shoot their videos quickly and confidently. We worked collaboratively on scripts in shared Google Docs and responded swiftly to questions about draft videos.
Two-way communication between state staffers and community organizations is key to ensuring trusted messenger-made videos are seen by their target audience. Upon the completion of the videos, our team matched relevant community organizations with specific videos to amplify them through organizations’ social platforms and mailing lists. For example, Imam Kolila’s video was shared by the Colorado Muslim Society and other Muslim-serving organizations. After seeing the videos, a number of Colorado groups expressed interest in having members of their outreach teams participate in future video programs.
By using video creation from trusted messengers with approved state talking points, a state communications staffer can quickly utilize a network of trusted messengers across diverse communities, covering numerous languages. Our pilot proves that low-cost, multilingual, culturally relevant, easily distributed, and fast turnaround videos featuring trusted messengers are possible, if there is close collaboration between communications staffers and community organizations.
Test State COVID-19 Content and Websites with the Target Audience on a Regular Basis
A flaw of most state-run communications can be one-sidedness. While significant resources are allocated to the production, approval, and translation of content, feedback on accessibility, cultural relevance, and usefulness of the content rarely reaches government staffers in charge of writing and updating it. In an environment of rapid communication, such as with the vaccine rollout, this can be especially challenging.
Building off of a wealth of industry standard, federal government approved, and trauma-informed usability testing methods, we facilitated remote feedback sessions in English and Spanish with 10 survey respondents who volunteered for further interviews. State partners heard concise feedback on the English and Spanish language web content they had invested a great deal of time and resources into creating. Timely short-term recommendations to a communications staffer that was updating the online COVID-19 vaccine FAQ—a big step towards continuing to improve public health message accessibility with feedback from Coloradans.
