DISSEMINATION AND EVALUATION

Your material is finished, but your job is not done. How your material is distributed will strongly influence how your audience perceives it. In addition, evaluating your material will tell you whether it accomplishes your goal. Finally, you’ll want to review and update your material to be sure that it remains current.

Effectively Disseminate Your Material

The following dissemination strategies can increase the likelihood that your material will reach and have an impact on its intended audience:

• Ask for reinforcement of your messages by sources of information seen by your audience as credible and trusted, for example, community leaders, schools, health care professionals, radio, television, and faith-based institutions. Your partners may be able to advise you about whom the audience sees as credible sources, and you will already have collected much of this information during “Step 3: Understand Your Audience.”
  
  
• Coordinate dissemination with other agencies that distribute traffic safety materials (e.g., the State highway-safety office, local health departments, and police departments).
  
  
• Distribute materials through programs used by your audience, for example, prenatal classes, English classes for speakers of other languages, WIC programs (the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children), pediatric programs, Head Start, child care agencies, drug and alcohol programs, multidisciplinary mental health agencies, local business associations, community volunteer groups, local consumer product-safety offices, local public health-insurance programs, and local civic organizations.
  
  
• Use innovative methods of distribution, for example, inserting safety messages into the State driver’s manual or property tax bills, or on Web sites.
  
  
• Your material is much more likely to be effective if it is part of a broader initiative to change traffic-related behavior. Include the material in larger programs or campaigns, for example, community booster-seat promotion, law enforcement and public health initiative to reduce impaired driving, or school-based pedestrian safety programs.