Dissemination Tips and Tricks

• Don’t be afraid to share your work. Remember, research is of no use unless it gets to the people who can use it!
• Speak up! During presentations or sharing of information, your experience is valuable and can be a positive influence on others.
• No/null findings are worth sharing. We need to know what works and who it works for as much as we need to know what doesn’t work or who a program may not work for. No findings are actually valuable findings!
• Find a format that works for you. If it is just a tool, an infographic, a presentational summary or a report, it is still more than the field had before you shared.
• De-identify! If your concern is that the report or the data provides information about your site or individual stakeholders in your state, you can easily remove this information and just give sites a “code” so that people know it is a different location. You can report data in the aggregate or summarize it in a way that doesn’t clearly identify individuals. The report is just as meaningful when the site or individuals are anonymous as it is when they are identified.
• Fancy doesn’t matter. Even super basic graphs and narrative in a report provide useful information.
• Timing. Dissemination doesn’t have to be limited to the end of your study. Consider whether there are any preliminary findings that can be shared earlier; draw up a timeline or plan for dissemination of findings to include sharing findings at different stages of your project.
• Expand your co-authors. If time and resources for report writing are scarce, consider finding others who can help with the writing. Additional co-authors can also give a different perspective on findings and recommendations stemming from those findings.
• Know where to go for ideas. Technical assistance providers (like Capacity Building Center for Courts) can help you think through how/where to disseminate and may even be able to help you share your work in presentations or collective sites.