4(a) Sharing

Figure 1. Formal displays are one way of sharing your experience (Forde, CC BY-SA 2.0)

After you have completed the previous stages, implemented and run your project, it is time to shine and share your journey with the wider community. Sharing the outcome of your project and process can provide some closure. It can also inspire others to action or enable you to start scaling your project for greater impact. Don’t be worried if your project didn’t work out as planned. Sharing failure and setbacks is often even more important than sharing success. There is much to learn either way.

In all cases, you need to consider your purpose and audience if you want your sharing to have impact. Just like your project was focused on a goal and the users, your sharing should too!

Purpose of sharing

The purpose of sharing your project probably will fall into one of three categories:

Informing - this is about explaining to an audience the why, how and what of your project. While informing is often a part of inspiring and persuading, it can also be an end goal itself, especially for some school-based sharing experiences that mark the closure of a project experience.

Inspiring an audience - this is about urging others to feel, do or change something. In the context of a project, it may involve changing people’s mindsets, lighting a fire, and calling to action, through an appeal that drives their intrinsic, or inner, motivation. Inspiring is a key part of scaling a project for greater impact.

Figure 2. Inspiring an audience to join you in a cause can be a purpose of sharing (peakpx, CC0)

Persuading an audience - this can also be about informing and inspiring, but with a more specific intent such as gaining funding, or getting people to take a specific action like voting. Persuading an audience often includes an extrinsic appeal to reason to induce people to take action. Persuading is a key part of scaling a project for greater impact.

As you can see there may be elements of all three of these purposes in some sharing experiences. However, it is helpful for you to determine your primary purpose, because it can inform which formats and media are fit for your goal.

Audience

Your audience is the group of people who you are interacting with. Just like you did with your project, you need to consider the user -- in this case the audience -- when planning a sharing strategy. Your audience will have certain expectations. You need to be aware of these expectations so that neither you nor your audience is disappointed by the sharing experience. Audience and purpose are closely connected, but there are some differences in approach depending on whether your audience is given to you or whether you choose your audience.

Given audiences

There may be times when your audience is given to you, or predetermined by someone else in some way. For example, if you are asked to share your project at a school exhibition or fair, then your audience is likely to be the parent community, teachers, other students and possibly members of the local community. The purpose of these experiences is often to provide closure to a project and to provide information to the community about student activities and achievements. If this is the case, a sharing session with the purpose to inform may mark the end of your project.

Figure 3. It is important to consider your audience when you share your project (Puan, CC BY-ND 2.0)

When an audience is given, there is often an expected sharing format. You may be asked to create a booth with a display and table. Or you may be able to demonstrate a product or be given the opportunity to talk. It is very important to understand the expectations of the event hosts, to ensure that you provide what the audience and host is looking for.

Figure 4. Two students presenting to an audience during an informative exhibition, with a display (Baganz)

In addition to understanding the basic expectations, you need to find out if you have flexibility to engage with the audience creatively. For example, are you able to use video, music, or some other media? Can you do a demonstration, or perform? You may also have to limit your presentation depending on who will be present. For example, if your project is related to an issue that is not appropriate for very young children to view or engage with, and they will be part of the audience, you may have to negotiate some limits on the format and information in your sharing with the hosts.

Chosen audiences

Even more exciting is when you get to choose your audience and sharing method, which is often the case if you are looking to inspire or persuade. Here you need to consider your target audiences, and how to share with them. The methods you choose for sharing, online or offline, will determine your reach, which is how many people in your target audience you connect with.

In circumstances where you choose your audience and method / format, you have to be very careful to select the right method or channel to share your project. Your options are much wider and the potential to miss the mark much greater.

Figure 5. When you choose your audience make sure you consider the right target and use a method to get the desired reach (Videoplasty, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

How to choose a sharing method? Factors and formats

When you set out to choose a sharing format and media, you need to consider the following factors:

What is your purpose? Inform, inspire or persuade?

Who is your audience? Define the audience clearly.

Given or chosen?
Targeted (limited) or untargeted?
Age?
Preferences?

3. How much reach do you need / want?

High reach (many in the target audience) or low reach (selected few in the target audience)

4. What are your limitations?

Venue?
Media?
Cost?

There is a wide range of digital and non-digital formats available for you to choose from, but not all are suitable for every condition you might have identified in the list above. The Venn diagram in Figure 6 shows a number of options:

Venn diagram of online and offline sharing options

Figure 6. Online and offline methods of sharing (Cao)

Generally speaking, it is easier to get greater reach with online sharing. With the press of a button, you can reach thousands, even millions of people. But with that greater reach, can come reduced impact, depending on the quality of your message and your own credibility and network. As you are probably aware, a well-crafted message that truly inspires can go viral and have a huge impact. A great example of this was the “flatten the curve” message (Figure 7) that went viral during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most online sharing will involve targeting certain audiences, instead of completely viral sharing. Choosing the right platforms and networks will ensure higher impact because you can reach the right audiences who are interested in your project. For example, if you want to reach more young people you might choose to share your project on Instagram. However, if you are interested in reaching a more professional audience, you might choose LinkedIn. If you want to connect with other changemakers, you might choose to use Global Impact or another platform.

Figure 7. The message about flattening the curve on COVID-19 infections was an effective use of online sharing early on in the pandemic. (RCraig09, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Offline sharing will mostly be done through events hosted by a range of groups. These could be local networking events or fairs or conferences, or regional, national and international events. You can research events related to your project and make applications to showcase your project or give a talk to target the right audience and reach those interested in what you have to say. In-person sharing can be a very powerful way to share your message and connect with those close-by who can help you take your project to the next level. Your networking is a very important part of finding the right offline avenues for you to engage with others. You will learn more about networking in Module 4(d).

Below is a list of some popular tools for formatting your message and project:

Canva - for making posters, brochures, catalogues, presentations and dozens of other formats for print and graphic design that can be used on all kinds of platforms. There are very many templates to choose from or you can create your own design.
Apple or Android video making and editing - It is very likely that you have built-in video making and editing software in whatever phone or laptop device you use. These are often very intuitive and can be learned quickly. If you need assistance, you may be able to ask a tech-savvy teacher or friend to help you.
Google sites - the new Google sites is a very easy and free way to create a website for your project, or a portfolio detailing your journey and the results.
Padlet - this platform has a number of formats for displaying information

What to include in your sharing

Informational content

Once you have determined your purpose, audience and methods, you need to consider what to include in the content of your sharing.

For all purposes, audiences and methods, you need to include the basic information about your project. Without this, the audience will have difficulty understanding. Golden circles, a framework shown in in Figure 8, is a way to communicate the journey you went on during your project by explaining the why, how and what of your project to your audience.

Why you started that journey, who the community is you were serving, what their needs were, why you chose them and their needs.
How you surveyed the community’s needs, how you developed and planned the project and how you took action.
What your product looks like, what kind of impact it had, what kinds of changes your project brought, and what the next steps are.

Figure 8. Simon Sinek’s Golden Circles (Mosborne01, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Practice activity 1

This video, though not created by a student, is about a student’s project. The purpose of the video is largely informational, though there are some inspirational elements in it.

Can you see the elements of the Golden Circle in the video?
Once you read the next section on inspiring, consider how this video, while mostly informational, also has the capacity to inspire.

Inspirational content

If you are moving beyond information to inspiration, you may want to consider a number of strategies.

First, is storytelling. Human beings relate to stories because they provide a way of understanding meaning. Connecting your project to specific human stories can be a way to get people to relate to the importance and impact of your project. So consider whether you can tell the story of your project, especially through the tale of an individual.

Another way of inspiring is to change people’s mindsets about the way the world works or their values, beliefs and assumptions. When you can showcase problems, or something surprising, in the way we view the world, you have the power to change systems and people’s behaviour, as we saw with the Iceberg Model. This strategy is discussed further in Module 4(c) on persuading and inspiring in the section on TED-style talks.

Persuasive content

If your aim is to persuade, you should make sure to include information that appeals to reason so that you can argue for your audience’s engagement with you. This will often mean including facts that you discovered in your investigation. Data is powerful, so using data you identified in your findings is particularly important to persuade, especially if you can represent the data in easily understandable graphic form. In the case where you need to persuade your audience to give you money, it is important to have concrete financial figures for what you need, so they can be confident that their money will be put to good use.

Practice Activity 2

Choosing the right way of sharing your work is not always easy. Discussing different circumstances can help. In each of the scenarios below, consider the guiding questions and determine what an appropriate method of sharing might be and what could be included in the sharing experience:

What is your purpose? Inform, inspire or persuade?
Who is your audience? Define the audience clearly.

Given or chosen?
Targeted (limited) or untargeted?
Age?
Preferences?

3. How much reach do you need / want?

High reach (many in the target audience) or low reach (selected few in the target audience

4. What are your limitations?

Venue?
Media?
Cost?

Scenario 1

You have just finished a project week or longer project experience at your school. You have been asked to present your project at an exhibition at the school.

Scenario 2

You have finished a successful project that produced a product that can help blind people in your community. You are thinking about scaling up that product to reach more people who need it.

Scenario 3

You have just finished a successful project to get people in your community to compost their organic waste. You want to inspire more people to do this.

Project Activity

Consider the guiding questions in the Practice Activity above and start planning the sharing experience for your own project. Discuss your ideas with peers or a teacher to get some feedback on your ideas to ensure that you have identified the right purpose, audience, method and platform. You can either use the Exhibition Concept Plan, if you are working on an informative exhibit-type sharing experience. Or you can use the Communications Concept Plan tool below to help you plan a broader strategy that might be a part of scaling your project, discussed in Module 4(b). Putting your ideas on paper can make it easier for a teacher or mentor to give you feedback on your ideas.

Examples in different contexts

Reducing plastic in the household

The student participated in a school project exhibition. The exhibition plan tool (link to household plastic waste example) was used to think through what would be included and how information would be positioned.
The student decided to use a 3-part display board with information on: background / research (panel 1), designing / planning / action (panel 2), and results / next steps (panel 3).
On a table in front of the display board were simple materials (to target a wide range of ages) outlining the plastic problem, actions consumers can take, a QR code with a one-page description of the project for the blind, and a QR code with contact information.
The key focus piece was two bags of plastic, one from before the intervention and one from after, with the weights / number of pieces of plastic indicated on the bags for comparison.

Mitigating CO2 emissions in the school

The students organised a large number of people from the school community to participate in the actual tree-planting. In this way, they shared the action itself through participation. Several students were responsible for taking video of the tree-planting, which were then edited together with other video and information about the entire project. The video was posted on the school’s social media platforms.
The students also planned a sprouting ceremony at the end of March to celebrate the trees’ survival over the winter. Those who had participated in the tree planting, as well as those who donated money towards the project were invited. Again, video was taken and then edited into the original video and reposted on the school’s social media platforms.

Informing people with Down syndrome about social distancing during a pandemic

As soon as it was ready, the students shared the final product - accessible video slideshow - in the following ways:
Email - to all the stakeholders/participants (people with Down syndrome and their families); the director of the local Down syndrome association, relevant government bodies (Ministry of Health and Health Insurance fund)
Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram). The video was uploaded on the official pages of the school and the students also shared it on their own private accounts.
The students wrote a piece for their school website and newsletter about the experience with creating accessible materials and added pictures they took as part of their documentation of the whole process.

Tools

Displays for exhibitions and reports

Don’t forget to document your work. For a reminder about documentation, see Module 1(e).

Ideas for documentation in this section include:

Exhibition concept plan
Communications concept plan
Video of your project's narrative

Works cited

Baganz, Matthew. Personal Project Exhibition 1 and 2. Strothoff International School, 2020.

Cao, Zhenxin. Online and Offline Methods of Sharing. 2020.

“Flatten the Curve.” Giphy, 2020, giphy.com/gifs/gilbertdigital-Lqa9oqqRIPFowrVj8Y/embed.

Forde, Glen. “Exchanges Exhibition Opening.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 29 May 2015, https://tinyurl.com/y5bf4nk2.

Images for examples in different contexts source information:

Samoilov, Yuri. “Coronavirus.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 20 Mar. 2020, https://tinyurl.com/ya2ngksd. CC BY 2.0

Webster, Tony. “Plastic Bottles - Waste.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 16 Sept. 2012, www.flickr.com/photos/87296837@N00/7992944072. CC BY 2.0

XoMEoX. “Tree.” Flickr, Yahoo!, 28 May 2017, https://tinyurl.com/y8bw46ns. CC BY 2.0

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