Transcription
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Elizabeth Ireland, and I am Assistant Vice President of Research and Programs at the National Health Council. I'm really excited to be kicking off today's webinar, which is part of our three-part series, which is intended to provide the healthcare community with a practical introduction to health literacy. Next slide, please.
Um, so, and just as a reminder, this is a webinar organized by the National Health Council. We were created over a hundred years ago by the patient organizations in the United States to bring folks together to advocate on behalf of patients with chronic diseases and disabilities. Here are the logos of our core members, the patient organizations, and we can go to the next slide, please.
So I want to start off with just a little bit of housekeeping information. First of all, the webinar—this first hour of the webinar—is being recorded and it will be available on the NHC's website after today's session. So you'll be able to go back and look at it, but the second hour is a workshop that's for NHC members and non-members who have registered for our Science of Patient Engagement Symposium. So we invite all folks who are are in the NHC membership to join or who register for the symposium to join that session. That session will not be recorded. This is a webinar, and all attendees are automatically muted, and you cannot unmute yourself. And if you have questions during today's webinar, go ahead and submit it through the Q&A function. We'll have some time at the end to go through general questions. If you have a clarifying question, feel free to put it in the Q&A function as well, and we'll have a couple of touch points throughout the webinar where we can address those. Next slide, please.
So I am really excited to be able to welcome our colleagues from Health Literacy Media, which is a non-profit organization based in St. Louis, Missouri, um, to present on today's webinar and on the the upcoming webinars as well. HLM has been a great partner to the National Health Council, and we're excited to be able to have them um introduce actually some examples from our own work as well as some of their work. And so today we have joining us Lisa Carey, who is a Senior Health Literacy Writer and Editor at HLM. She reviews hundreds of pages of content every year and uses health literacy principles to translate health content into plain language. She lends an expert eye to everything health insurance related and uses her design background to contribute to videography. We're also joined today by Chris Casey, who's a Senior Health Communication Coordinator at HLM, where he provides technical and creative expertise and content development in support of HLM's health literacy, health communication, and training programs. And so again, thanks so much, Lisa and Chris, for joining us, and Lisa, I'd like to turn it over to you to kick us off.
Okay. Great. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. It's great to be here today with you all. Um, this is our agenda for today. Um, we're going to first talk about what is health literacy and how does it affect communication? Then we'll go into creating effective messages by applying those health literacy strategies, choosing the right medium for your message, and then finally resources for health literacy and communication best practices. And we'll be here for about an hour.
Okay. So first, let's talk about health literacy. Um, many of you may know what it is already. There are actually many different definitions of health literacy, um, but we look kind of at one that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services created here. You can see on the left as part of its Healthy People 2020 initiative, and you can see that this definition emphasizes an individual's social determinant of health as being crucial to their health literacy. And while those social determinants are very important, here on the right you can see a newer definition that also recognizes that health literacy is the responsibility of organizations um who who put out that health information to enable people to find, understand, and use the health information. So it's it's really it's not just in on individuals; it's also on all of us who are creating that health information. Low health literacy is, you know, it it affects all aspects of public health and safety. Um, it's associated with worse overall health status, more emergency room visits, more hospitalizations, and even higher mortality rates. So it is very important. Let's look at first at patient barriers. There are many barriers on the individual levels, such as language, you know, the ability to read, write, and comprehend health materials. Um, the mindset can include emotions and attitudes about health care based on past experiences and what they hear in the news and social media. And then the cost can be a major barrier for people seeking health care. It affects where people can go for care, on their ability to follow through on instructions, um, so that that is a huge barrier as well. Um, then let's look at at providers. Provider barriers to patient care can be using technical words or medical jargon that, you know, they learned in med school. These words become second nature to them, and so it's easy to to think that, you know, patients are understanding them. Um, providers often use vague or unclear instructions, and then it's a real challenge um to work with diverse patients. Um, cultural competence—sometimes called cultural humility—uh, requires a provider to unpack biases um about their own beliefs and background and and really try to be truly client-centered, um, but you know, it it's it's difficult. So then there's the the overall system, and we're talking about the not only the hospital system but the insurance system, you know, all all of the um things that are set up here in this country that allow people to get health care. There are serious barriers here. It's it's tough to understand. Patients need to know about the various types of health professionals and services, how to access care, where to go, and so on. The built environment itself presents barriers. Large hospitals are hard to navigate. And lastly, culture. We feel like this is a system barrier um because every person carries different beliefs about medicine and health and wellness, but we believe that the U.S. healthcare system really has a culture that caters to certain patients—oftentimes patients who, you know, have good health insurance are the ones who get the best care. So all right, so how can we lower barriers to health literacy? We can first use clear language, layout, and design to help our audiences understand complex health information. And we always say, you know, use the same clear communication for everyone because even people with high education levels can sometimes struggle with health literacy. So that's just a little bit about health literacy, and now let's go ahead and move on to the strategies portion.
Okay. So here is a before and after at HLM. What happens is clients from different organizations, you know, all the way from pharma companies to universities to nonprofits, send us their health information, um, kind of like this this thing on the left, the document on the left, and then we, you know, look at it for health literacy. We do design. Um, the revisions that we give back to the clients are suggestions; they're not um they don't have to take our suggestions, but we use a hundred-point checklist um that is all evidence-based, um, and we just wanna point out here that health literate communication is not just about words; it also includes design, such as white space, color choice, visuals that reflect the intended audience or the purpose, so on. On the left is a draft language about Alzheimer's disease that we received from a university, and then on the right is the front cover of the brochure that we created from it. Um, so these evidence-based principles, when applied together, can just make a huge difference in creating materials and media that that your audience can understand and act on to make informed decisions, and those principles are what we'll be talking about today. So um these are sort of the the five main categories of health literacy for clear print and digital communications. First, you want to tailor your message to your purpose and audience; in other words, thinking about who you're trying to reach and why; getting getting to the point; making your content easy to navigate; using clear, direct language so the information is easy to read and understand; then making your material actionable, telling the readers what you want them to do; and finally using clear design to draw attention and improve the reader's comprehension of your material. Um, I do want to emphasize the this, you know, we've we've put examples in here of NHC's materials and and some others; they're not necessarily always the final versions, just so you know. Um, okay, and I'm going to turn it over to Chris to talk about this.
Thanks, Lisa.
Hello, everybody. Uh, this is Chris Casey. So thanks, Lisa, for that overview and introduction to health literacy, an overview of the strategies that we use at HLM to make health communication as clear and actionable as it can be. So we're going to take a deep dive into all the strategies that Lisa just introduced in the previous slide. So the first strategy is what we call purpose and audience for short, but the idea here is to tailor your message to your purpose and audience. And so um to put that succinctly, decide and determine who it is that you're speaking to, and what do you want them to do, to know, to think, uh, to believe. So really focusing in on your message, because it's relatively rare that your audience is going to be everybody. Usually your audience is going to be tailored in terms of um a subgroup or a subpopulation that you want to reach because of a a particular health issue or a health concern, or people who are advocates or policy makers, or whatever it might be. You can think about your audience in a great variety of ways. So we have—forgive me, I noticed uh um a chat come up in the Q&A; I wasn't sure if that was something we wanted to—it disappeared before I could read it. I don't know if that was something we wanted to attend to at this moment or not.
Chris, you can keep going.
Thank you. Thanks, Elizabeth.
Okay. As Lisa said, we are going to show these principles via a lot of examples today. Sorry, I'm waiting for the screen to advance. Here we go. Okay. So before you can engage your users, you need to have a firm grasp on two important factors: purpose and audience, as I've said. Whether the resource—communication resource—you're developing is online or in print, health information should have a clear statement telling users what they will learn from the resource and who it's for. So here on screen now is an example of a home page from HUD—Housing and Urban Development—a federal agency. So at first glance, can you tell what HUD is or or what they do? Not really. So unless you happen to know what HUD stands for, there isn't much here on this home page that, again, at a glance, you'd be able to tell um what what HUD is or or what they do, and you'd have to scroll down um to or or click to advance this sort of carousel um to to figure that out. And there's actually a lot of eye-tracking evidence that says at least half of users won't scroll down when they arrive at a web page; they'll evaluate whether they want to continue reading it based on what appears by default without having to scroll. So in the context of a web page, it's really especially important to make sure that your your purpose and your audience is clear at first glance. So here's a revised home page, also from Housing and Urban Development, um, and this clearly shows its purpose and, you know, one idea, one one concept or image of its intended audience. So in a very short statement, HUD says, "We help help you meet your housing needs," and it shows a picture of of a family in front of their home. So just with some really simple language, you can communicate and add a lot of value for your viewers. Um, just try to imagine um that they don't know anything about your topic or anything um about what you're trying to say. Don't make any assumptions about your audience, and that way you can really start from uh almost start from zero for for helping audience members understand what you're trying to do. So this is a web page, but on a print document, you know, there's still a lot of print materials going around. It makes this clear through a title on the front page of your your print document. Don't don't make people turn the page. So that's just sort of an overview of this idea of purpose and audience, um, so let's dig in a little bit more to the audience piece. So so health literacy is um not writing so that everyone can understand it; it's writing so that your intended readers can understand. And this is a step that many people skip; they write in sort of a one-size-fits-all manner, and that's just not always useful for a lot of people. It can be challenging though because you need to find out as much as you can about your intended audience. So here's some ways that you might think about describing your audience. So you know, demographic characteristics: are they in a specific age bracket? Are they in a particular racial or ethnic group or or language? Do they are they in a certain profession or even a certain geographic area? So those are sort of demographic variables, but there's also specific needs you might address, such as low literacy or low health literacy, vision impairment. So that would impact the way you design and present materials or the media that you choose to put them out into the world, or um cultural aspects, you know, cultural differences between different audience subgroups, and and really this list goes on, you know, there's there's a great number of different ways um that you can describe your audience. You know, think about their their thoughts, their beliefs, um what preconceived notions might they have about your topic, um and that kind of thing. So make uh you know, a lot of times we'll make a like a persona um of a that represents a audience member that we're trying to reach, and it helps kind of um make a human, you know, give you an audience, you know, even if it's an imaginary person. And so that's a quick overview for um purpose and audience, and the second strategy overall that we're going to talk about is to make your material easy to navigate. And so what do we mean by that? So it's really the way material—that information—is structured and presented that can make a really big difference in its in your audience's ability to understand it. So sometimes we'll receive language from a client, like Lisa was telling you about our work earlier, um and there's certain sections that that can't be edited for one reason or another; maybe there's a medical legal reviewer who says, "No, you can't change that information about side effects," or whatever it might be. So even without changing a single word, you can really help your readers understand and use it just by sort of changing its overall structure in the way it's presented. So let's dive into this. So first we want to um talk about the the scope. So you know, when you know your purpose and audience, that's going to help you decide on what to put in and more importantly what to leave out. Um, sometimes people decide they want to have a sort of an encyclopedic presentation of all the information and show what experts they are, but we advise people to shy away from that. So you know, use only essential information. What these—what does your audience really need to know? Um, there's sometimes sort of a rule of three's piece here, you know, if you have three main points that you want your audience to take away, decide on what those are. All those points should relate back to that main purpose. So that's a really easy way to decide if something should go in in or out. Does it clearly help um relate back to the that one um sort of overriding communication objective that you have? Um, and then a a kind of a nice rule of thumb, think about the the what, the how, and the why of your material. And so that means what's what's your topic, um again focusing on that communication objective, how—so how should readers carry out a behavior, as as Lisa said earlier—health literacy is about action, not just understanding. Um, a lot of the time we want—most of the time we want—our audience to actually do something, not just to learn something. And and why should they do it? And so when you add put these three sort of approaches together—what to do, how to do it, and why it's important—those that's kind of a three-legged stool that really helps helps your audience understand and take action. So get to the point, putting the most important information first. We'd like to think that our audiences read every word of materials or messages that we put out into the world, but in reality they probably don't. So if you want to have the one thing you want them to know, put that first. So when users navigate through a material—through a material—or a website, they're looking for answers to questions they might have; they're looking for information that rela that relates directly to them. So as I said, many readers only read the first few words on a page or the first paragraph or even just the title, um, you know, especially if they're busy professionals such as policymakers. So it's really important to get to the point. And so um on each page and in each section, put the most important information first. So on the right here, this little this little illustration, you know, that uses the metaphor of a road, right? So as you help users go down the road of your content and navigate that road, if they don't make it, put the most important thing first. So if they don't continue down the path you'd like them to to go down, at least they'll see that that need to know that most important most specific um information. And then put the the background information or the least important information last. And sometimes it could be hard to think about something as least important, but again it's that it's what's that—what's that one piece that you want them to know that's the most important? So this difference that we talk about between need to know and nice to know, right? So need to know information is information that helps users make decisions about their health or take action. So the nice to know information is information that won't necessarily help them do what they need to do. So saying um you know, "50,000 people in the United States have this certain health condition," or "x number are diagnosed every year," that can be really interesting information for your audience, but it doesn't necessarily help your audience understand what they need to do to manage their disease, for example. So we've talked about what what to leave in, what to take out, and sort of what order to put it in. So we'll sort of illustrate this with an example. So um sort of a before and after of taking some information and and applying health literacy strategies. So we spoke about putting the purpose of a material in the main title. It's also important to put the most important information in the first, say, like an introductory paragraph. It should support the purpose and give readers context for reading and motivation for reading the rest of your material. So looking at this material, take a minute to look at it and and think, "Does it put the most important information first?" The title says, "Department of Social Services Family Support Division Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program Application." And so by way of comparison, here's the material that puts the most important information first. So here's what this is: "Application for Louisiana's Hurricane Katrina Medicaid Program. This program is for residents of Louisiana who have been affected by Hurricane Katrina." So it says what it is, it says who it's for, and then it's in then it says what it does: "It provides full Medicaid benefits um this is kind of old now, but until December 31, 2005." And so the the item on the left, it it has titles that kind of serve as labels that says what what it is, but it doesn't say what you can do with it, right? Um, so first we have, "Please read the instructions carefully," um how we're going to process your information, um you know, all this sort of inside baseball stuff that that doesn't necessarily help at a glance your audience know um what this is, what they can do with it, what do they need to know. Tying your message to current events, um relating it to, you know, especially in inpatient advocacy communications, you know, tying it to current events when appropriate, providing context and relevant background information, and including a clear action step is good. So [Music] all right, but let's go ahead and jump into using clear, direct language. This is sort of the the principle that most people think of when they hear the term literacy. Um, so again, knowing who your audience is will help you choose the words that will resonate with them. So for example, these terms might resonate with an audience of policymakers who think in terms of economic factors, revenues, sustainable energy, constituents. By contrast, for words that resonate with the general public, they might think in terms of savings, going green, and friends and family. So that's always, you know, it's it always goes back to purpose and audience. Every every aspect here um so we always talk about jargon. Jargon are words that it takes sort of special knowledge to understand what they mean. Um, we've all got industry jargon, health jargon, you know, all kinds of things, but the way to deal with them—with jargon words—is uh you can either replace it if there's a good, you know, more common or familiar word that means the same thing, or if if it's a term—a jargon term—that patients need to know, then you can define it the first time you use it. So decide if your readers need to know a term. Okay, like "authored by"—is that a term that people need to know? Uh, not really. You can just say "written by." This is all about writing the way you speak. So if you're having trouble writing some material, um imagine that you're telling somebody about your topic on the phone or talking face to face, and then write it that way. It's a more casual, sort of conversational style of speaking. So um here's another one: "incision." Uh, it's it's a term that a lot of doctors use, maybe, but in everyday language we would just say "cut." Um, okay, here's an example of uh we lifted this from the template for agreements that we reviewed for NHC—confidential information—and in that context, people would need to know what that means. So we would define it on first use as "non-public, private information that's protected by mutual agreement of the parties in this contract." Similarly, "clinical trials"—if people are considering [Music] joining a clinical trial, they need to know what it is. And so you would say, "Research studies designed to learn how our bodies respond to medicines or other treatments." Okay, so now it's your turn. Um, in the in the Q&A or the chat, um let's see how would you—how could you replace "on behalf of"? That's a simple word; we would just say "for." Okay, here's another one: "conduct," okay, and we would just say "do" or "carry out." Okay, "participate"—it could be "take part." Um, another thing that we're always looking to do with these words is taking these multi-syllable words like "participate" and turn them into shorter words, and that really lowers the reading level of your materials. Okay, one more: "undertake," and that could be just "do." Okay. So another thing that we always look at is to use active voice. Um, you remember active and passive voice that that you probably, you know, had to learn in in school. Um, maybe you thought you'd never need to know this in real life, but actually um using active voice makes your writing much more direct and actionable. It clarifies who's doing what, and that simplifies the sentence and clarifies the action for readers. So active voice means that the person or object doing the action—who we call the actor—comes before the verb. So for example, this is a passive sentence: "This interview is being recorded by a researcher." The researcher is the actor, and that's way at the end of the sentence. So instead we would say—to be active—"The researcher is recording this interview." It makes sentences shorter, um and just you know, a lot more sort of direct. Um, what I was talking about a little while ago—writing the way you speak. So to have this sort of conversational tone, you know, using second-person voice such as "you" and "your" in your writing, um using familiar, everyday words such as um you know uh body parts. We would say like um for instance, instead of if the first time you use the word "urine," um put p in, you know, in parentheses behind it, because that's the way people think of it in real life. Um, also, you know, remove words that don't add to the meaning of your message. Um, so you know, here's an example. This is from the NHC glossary that we reviewed, and the original definition of efficacy is kind of long: "The ability of an intervention to produce the desired beneficial effect. It is studied in ideal circumstances to understand the true effect of the intervention." And that's absolutely, you know, true, but it's it's a little bit long. So we revise that to: "How well a treatment works in a clinical trial where an ideal, defined setting helps researchers study its true effect." Whenever we revise, we make sure that we maintain the essential meaning, um but just you know, by cutting down on words. Um, here's another example. This is a paragraph that uses words you probably wouldn't say in a conversation with someone. Um, you know, "We understand that people are concerned about the costs associated with health care in general." You can tell this is kind of maybe from a corporate report or something like that, you know, instead and hear words that, you know, you wouldn't use just in normal conversation with people. So just changing it to, you know, "We understand that people worry about the costs of health care, especially for prescription drugs. We're patients too. We're committed to helping people—helping more patients—get the medicines and vaccines they need." So it's just, you know, much more simple. Um, okay, let's move on. This is our fourth strategy, and it's to make your materials actionable. Probably, I would say the majority of um you know, materials that most of us are sending out do include actions; they want people to do something. So what you need to do is describe the action in detail; give them simple, detailed action steps; focus on what readers should do, not what they shouldn't do. Um, for instance, um [Music] saying something like, you know, "Don't forget to to ride your or to uh wear a bike helmet the next time you ride your bike," instead tell them what they should do: "Remember to, you know, wear a bike helmet the next time you ride your bike." Um, here's an example of numbered steps from the new NHC template for legal agreements, and you can see when something happens in sequence, we normally number the list instead of just using bullets. Um, also, to encourage readers to take action, make your materials personal and motivating. Um, add emotional appeal; um that can make it more effective, kind of like this example here. Um, you know, show examples of how it affects the members of your audience. Uh, giving them the benefits of taking action is a great way to motivate people. Now I'm going to pass it back over to Chris.
Okay. Hello again. Thanks, Lisa. Um, so as as we've um said sort of at the very beginning of this presentation, health literacy is not only about the words, um and Lisa has done a great job of telling us about that piece, but it's also the way your information looks and the way it's presented visually. It can make a huge difference in your audience's ability to attend to the information you're putting it out rather than dismissing it in the first place, but it also helps them navigate and read and understand it. And so this is the the thing, you know, we're uh HLM is a full-service creative um health literacy uh company, so we have multiple graphic designers on staff, and um which is wonderful, um but it's really important to know that you don't have to be a graphic designer um in order to use good design. Um, and so you know, design—it isn't about decoration or ornamentation; uh it's about making communication clear and easy for the reader. So this this is really true in any aspect of design, but particularly in the context of health literacy and health literate materials, which is not to say we don't think material should be attractive or beautiful, but this is really a concern of information design and making information understandable for your audience. So to show an example, there we go. So as I said, clear design helps readers understand. And so here's some little design tips that you can use; anyone can use. So put headings in bold print or use color to help them um pop out from the the body text. And so that's that organization um piece of um headings should really orient your audi your audience to what comes next. Headings should be questions that your audience has so they can scan and find the information that they're looking for and so on. When you have an id items—three items or more—let's say you've got a paragraph with items that are being your naming, and they're all separated by commas, put those—go ahead and put those—in a bulleted list rather than in a paragraph; can be really a great way to break down information into kind of bite-sized pieces. So um but when you when those bullets or those individual items are sort of like action steps where you know you have to be done in sequence, um those are numbered steps; go ahead and number those rather than just putting them into bullet points. That way it's—do this—it's easy to see—do this first, do the second, you know, do this third and so on. And then using design to highlight action steps. So when there's something that the the reader needs to do, you know, just pull it in in a simple little colored um pullout box, and that really helps draw the eye towards that that action step, that behavior that you want people to do. So you know, on the right here, here's just a little example of how all these things can—all these elements can—work together. So this is something we worked on for a health system here in the state of Missouri. Um, it has a clue—the the title is large; it's clear; it has just a little color applied to it; you know, it isn't anything fancy. Um, "What steps should I take at home?" is kind of pulled out into that white text over the green um sort of shape there; just helps the the viewer's eye go towards that. Just um a couple little simple icons that you can download from the internet just to suggest, "Hey, this is about what you can do at home; this is about, you know, taking medicines or when you should talk to your doctor." Um, icons can just be—they can add some variety for the eye; they can suggest what the content is about; um and then just some simple typography for this list, like like I talked about. And so you know, I just wanted to show this as an example because it's it isn't necessarily something that you'd have, you know, a high-end professional design bureau do for you. These are things that you can do on software that you have available at your fingertips. Um, and so fonts—so fonts are some of the most important sort of raw materials for putting communication together. Um, choosing the right fonts can make your communication easier to read. And focus on choosing a clear font. So for digital communications, always choose a sans-serif font. Some examples are Arial or Calibri or Trebuchet. However, there are—those are, you know, fonts that come on every computer um out of the box, but there's a lot of fonts that you can download from like Google Fonts, for example, for free. Um, so don't feel limited to those three. So choose—choose serif fonts or—excuse me—choose sans-serif fonts. Serif fonts are these fonts that have the little feet, you know, at the bottom of this letter r or the i or the f. Those are—those have a name; they are called serifs. Serif fonts are great for newspapers and novels that are typeset by professional typesetters and feature long, uninterrupted um sections of text, but that's not what we're doing with healthcare communication, right? We're breaking things down into bite-sized chunks that your audience can clearly understand. So shy away from using serif fonts. Um, making text easy to read. So all of our computers give us many um ways to format fonts and many fancy fonts to choose from, but but you really want to keep it simple. So use sentence case—there's just a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence, and all the rest lower case except for proper nouns. Avoid using all caps or title case. This is for readability, especially for persons with lower health literacy or lower literacy levels. It keeps the the letter forms consistent and easy to recognize. Use the normal letter shape. So avoid using italics or, you know, overuse of underlining text. So again, with audiences who have lower literacy, sort of the cognitive process of reading is a little bit different. Um, people sort of recognize the letter forms individually and then assemble them into words and then assemble the words into sentences. And so you want to make that task as easy for them as possible by keeping the letter forms readily recognizable. And make it big enough. You know, use at least a size 12 font. If your audience is a little older and their eyes are changing—like mine are—maybe even make it a little bit bigger—a 13 or possibly even 14-point font for for body text. So just some little simple things that you can do to keep your content easy to read. So visual cues. So highlighting key points or action items through visual cues—these are simple things that you can do. So you know, a box or a sidebar, as I said earlier; using icons, as I said earlier; checklists—I'm putting uh there's icons—putting items in in checklists. If you want—if you want people to do something—it also encourages them to write uh or check off that that item on the checklist. We know that when people interact with a document by writing on it or doing something to it, it increases the probability that they'll keep it rather than just throwing it away, and that they'll that they'll attend to it. Tables, charts, graphs, you know, using boldface, applying color, you know, maybe choosing a different font to help something stand out—just all these little things that you can use to help help readers identify those sort of key points on that important information. So you know, here's just—whoops, I need to go back—here is just a little example. So this comes from our work with informed consent documents for in the pharma space. Um, so this, you know, could easily have just been text, um but we decided to make a really simple table out of this content. So "What will happen during a clinical study if you decide to join the study?" Um, you know, "How long the study will last?" So step one—we use color; we use a simple little circle—and this is essentially just a table that but it has just some very simple design elements applied to it. So it's got little circles for the numbers and kind of the um rounded corners of the of the of the box, the reversed um text, you know, the eye is drawn towards these heavy areas of bold color. Um, so this is a a pretty simple example of that. And so now we're going to talk about how, you know, everything we've talked about so far has been in the area of what do you say, how do you say it, and now I'm going to talk a little bit about how do you get it out into the world. Um, this is going to be kind of a fast overview, but all the same. Um, so you know, 60 years ago, Marshall McLuhan said, "The the medium is the message," right? So um where people encounter your messages kind of affects the way they the way they experience them. So again, um going back to that purpose and audience thing, so when you're deciding what medium to use, think about your audience. For a professional audience such as medical experts or researchers, you you just sort of have the luxury of using longer-form communication: white papers, um reports, uh research papers, you know, obviously like you know, academic publishing,
Communication approach: too, so let's spend a quick moment to jump in a little bit to social media. Um, this is by no means exhaustive, but um, so we know social media is um, here to stay. As you know, it's a proven effective method for sharing messages and media with um, with audiences. It's also the place where you can find the most people. 72 percent of US adults use at least one social media platform, um, and it's it also provides ways to um, with paid or boosted content, to reach certain audience segments.
Breaking social media down by age, you know, as you might expect, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be on social media. But certainly, this is changing day-to-day, um, and these bars are going to sort of converge um, in the in the future, um, and you know, 40 percent of adults age 65 and up are on social media, and that's only going to increase. These data don't reflect any increase in social media use associated with the COVID pandemic, so these are probably even higher now.
A lot of people don't necessarily think about YouTube as social media, but it really is an alternative to sort of discursive traditional media. YouTube is actually the the world's second largest search engine after Google. So um, you know, prioritizing uh video content um is really going to allow you to reach a much wider audience. And Facebook is the second, so YouTube and Facebook are the top two platforms um, respectively. And then obviously there's Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, new, you know, um, TikTok is new, you know, there's there's a new list of platforms as long as your arm. And so it's, you know, just a question of where where is my audience, you know, where where can I reach them?
So most U.S. adults now believe that social media is either a very effective or somewhat effective way to raise awareness about political or social issues, to create sustained social movements, to get elected officials to pay attention to issues that are important to them, and to help give a voice to underrepresented groups. So um, these data come from the the Pew Pew Research. So you know, there's certainly widespread agreement that social media is is a great rate of read great way to reach your audience for an advocacy in an advocacy context.
And just some quick guidelines on um, sharing content on social media: some best practices. So obviously, you know, keep your posts relevant to your mission and goals. Um, you know, again, that goes back to that purpose and audience piece I talked out talked about upfront. Um, develop posts that are unique to you: what's your voice? Um, what's your style? What's a type of visual, a color palette? Um, what's language that you want to use? So that over time your audience, when the audience sees a particular post, they attribute it to you. It's kind of a branding concern. Share content that has value: content that means something not only to you but to your audience. So your audience is more likely to engage with posts that they can relate to, and those aren't necessarily always the things that matter to to us as communicators. And then lastly, watch how your posts perform and adjust accordingly. Are people engaging more with videos? Are they engaging more with graphics or infographics? And kind of pivot from that based on what you're seeing.
And lastly, we just have a handful of resources there that are really valuable. I won't talk through these just for the sake of time. [Music] And so lastly, hopefully, sorry, I've got a dog here who's howling at me. Um, if you have any questions, we can entertain them now. Yeah, and I I do want to um, emphasize that and maybe we should have said this at the beginning: we will um, have a like a summary um, with the most important points of this webinar and these resources um, and we'll you know, get those out to you. We'll send them to NHC um for them to distribute for you. Um, so let's see what questions, let's see. Um, somebody asked here: Do you recommend using uh second person language in all communications in press releases as well? And I would say no, um, not necessarily. It depends on the sort of the purpose and and the formality of your communication. [Music] We would probably advocate using second person in all in in most consumer materials where you're really trying to speak directly to the person. Um, so yeah, that's a judgment call. Good good question. Um, yeah, I'm not seeing. Elizabeth, were there any other questions? Lisa, there's just a couple of other questions that came in, so we have um, we already covered that we'll be sharing some materials. We'll have those up on our website and then can have it in the post email as well. Um, also, maybe this one is from Nicole: is if you could comment on how you've applied clear design to social media platforms? Um, and I think it's also something that we'll be covering as part of the the next two webinars in this series, but I'm happy to give you a moment to comment on that as well, um, if you'd like to. Okay. Um, yeah, I know we're at time. Chris, would you like to? I mean, that's kind of a broad topic. Um, I think I can give a hopefully a very quick um, sort of digest for that. Um, we've I'll just to give an example: we've been working on a on a social media campaign um, with a large sort of a coalition in the city of Nashville to try to boost their vaccine uptake. Um, and so graf, we do a lot of posts that have um, like a graphic that go along with um, with the with the the actual post um, verbiage. And those those posts, you know, those posts that have graphics tend to, you know, outperform just having the text alone, which is why when you scroll through your Twitter feed um, it's you know, when you're talking about organizational communication, it's relatively rare to see like just the text of the tweet. Usually there's a graphic that goes along with it. And so in those graphics, it's just you know, a matter of um, highlighting that key message and you know, large type, you know, in that in that context of that little square that all the social media platforms are sort of converging on, it's you know, those same items that we talked about before as you know, less is more: having that main um, you know, message being large and bold and really easy to see. You know, faces tend to draw eyeballs in. So um, you know, deciding what that what that clear what that message you want to be is and and putting it front and center. Um, and also, you know, social media is um, they've been talking about pivot to video for a long time, so um, we really do the same thing with videos. You know, think about a title screen for a video that applies some of these same um, you know, plain language uh clear design principles. Um, so when people are scrolling through that wall um, or you know, through their wall, they see something that's at a glance they can they can see what that main message is. So hopefully that speaks a little bit to the overlap between design and social media.