Stories

Tag: marketing

  • Solidarity across public health and medicine silos during a pandemic

    Solidarity across public health and medicine silos during a pandemic

    We are launching a new Scholar programme about environmental threats to health, with an initial focus on radiation. (I mapped out what this might look like in 2017.) As part of the launch, we are enlisting support of immunization colleagues.

    Our immunization programme is our largest and most advanced programme, and still growing fast since its inception in 2016. At The Geneva Learning Foundation, we have spent 5 years pouring mind, body, and soul into building what has become the largest digital platform for national and sub-national immunization leaders.

    Along the way, we discovered that it is not only about scale. Social Network Analysis (SNA) by colleagues Sasha Poquet and Vitomir Kovanovic at the Centre for Complexity and Change in Learning is now helping us to understand the power in the relationships not just one-to-many but many-to-many across the network.

    Yes, there is a linkage as most vaccines are for children, and our first course in the new programme (with WHO) is about communicating radiation risks in paediatric imaging. But I was not sure if our request for help would make sense to the immunization network, especially when so many immunization staff are overwhelmed by COVID-19 vaccine introduction.

    Yet, in less than 2 hours, immunization colleagues had already shared the announcement over 300 times. This is an impressive display of solidarity across public health and medicine silos.

    This bodes well for the Foundation’s work as we are developing new programmes in other areas of global health, such as non-communicable diseases (NCDs) or neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) like female genital schistomiosis (FGS).

    Until this morning, I was not sure to what extent one programme’s members would be willing to support others, outside their field of specialty.

  • The Law of Halves

    The Law of Halves

    How many people do you need to recruit ten thousand learners?

    The preliminary questions are: is there an established network of learners? This requires that learners are connected to each other, and not simply end nodes in a pyramidal structure.

    And, do you have access to the network?

    These questions may be answered empirically.

    Publish your course.

    Build it and they may come – through the network.

    This is the value proposition of the MOOC aggregators: sign up for one course and you become part of its network.

    Expect to receive frequent communication as the aggregator’s value to the institutions who feed it content depends on its ability to convert one course enrollment into a lifelong pattern of registrations.

    What if they do not come?

    Much seems to depend on the level of computer literacy.

    If your target learners are computer software engineers, offer a relevant, quality course and they are likely to find it.

    What if they are not?

    Traditional marketing principles apply.

    Send a targetted e-mail through a trusted channel to 500 addresses.

    Expect 25 to click through to your registration page.

    Then the Law of Halves applies.

    You will lose half through each successive step required to participate in the course.

    So let’s say 13 register.

    Half of those will actually start the course.

    So, if you want ten thousand learners, target 800,000 addresses.

    On the first step (targetted e-mail), you can improve the click-through rate by improving the clarity of the value proposition (read: selfish, what’s-in-it-for-me incentive) and by offering direct access (in the invitation e-mail) to a screencast that walks you through the enrollment process.

    On the successive steps, a combination of screencasts and live online sessions (call them “briefings” or “orientation” or whatever) can help.

    Last but not least, turning the launch of the course into an event requires synchronicity.

    Do not underestimate how much identity matters to the way human beings connect and interact online.

    Unless your learners are savvy enough to communicate through social media, e-mail remains the lowest common denominator.

    It is a necessary evil.

    The only way to push content, reminders, questions, or surveys to your learners.

    Unfortunately, a merciless law of diminishing returns applies there also.

    Your course’s mailings are likely to increasingly end up in spam or junk mail boxes.

    And e-mail fatigue ensures that even the most motivated learners will read fewer and fewer course-related communication that is dropped into their inboxes.

    Computer literacy is crucial, again, because low computer literacy makes it probable that a learner won’t be checking for false positives and is less likely to have developed the filtering skills to quickly process and correctly identify relevant e-mails.

    Photo: My first computer, a TRS-80 Pocket Computer.