What is your message?

What is your message?

By now, you probably defined your goal and your audience. However, there is still one aspect that needs to be discussed: what is your message? What do you want to talk about? As we discussed in the previous steps, your message should consider both your goals and the audience’s ones.

In this video, we introduce a tool that can help you to define and simplify your message, especially when you want to spreading awareness about a problem that our society faces and propose a solution.

This tool is the message box, which we are proposing in the version developed by Nancy Baron and COMPASS, a science communication NGO.

This tool will not help you define your topic, but rather it will help you organize your thoughts and the elements of your argument around its core, and to build a logical flow that binds all together.

The message box is the tool we will ask you to use in this week’s assignment, but it is not the only aid you can use to define your message.

When considering the single aspects, a similar approach is found in the messaging templates proposed by the Scientist’s Guide to Talking with the Media.

This book is published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science organization based in the US. Its desk reference is freely available from the UCS website, and the download link is provided in the “see also” section.