As part of a decade-long effort to bridge the divide between research and communities’ experience, AcademyHealth developed and delivered policy communications curricula to support researchers in sharing their work beyond academic audiences as a partner in the RWJF funded Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program. Through this work, we saw firsthand what helps research reach, resonate with, and be used by the people it’s meant to serve, and what gets in the way. One lesson that stood out: dissemination is still too often treated as a final deliverable–something that happens once a study is complete, rather than something built into the research process itself. The result is predictable: findings that don’t travel far, don’t resonate, or don’t translate into action. This is especially true in community-engaged work, where impact depends on relevance and trust.
We started, as many communication training efforts do, by focusing on standard dissemination outputs like research briefs, op-eds, journal articles, and conference presentations. These standard tools are common and can be effective with some audiences. However, when we expand our understanding of who our audiences are, it comes clear that these approaches can be overly technical, hard to access, or disconnected from how communities actually share and engage with knowledge.
When dissemination isn’t grounded in audience and context, it can miss the people it is intended to serve, overlook community priorities, and unintentionally reinforce inequities. By centering academic priorities over lived experience, these approaches can amplify researcher authority and minimize community voices. In doing so, they can reproduce broader patterns of whose knowledge is valued and whose perspectives shape decisions.
In contrast, community-driven approaches create space for lived experience, context, and collective meaning-making, ensuring that research resonates with and empowers the communities it aims to serve.
Through the course of this work, IRL Fellows—supported by AcademyHealth—reframed dissemination in real time, moving it from the end of the research pipeline into the center of the process. That shift pushed all of us to expand our thinking about audiences, outputs, and what meaningful impact looks like.
Over time, reflection, feedback, and multiple pivots shaped the program’s evolution. Dissemination moved beyond templates and structured formats toward more relational approaches grounded in meeting people where they are. Fellows worked closely with community partners to shape messaging, format, and purpose, emphasizing co-creation, iteration, and ensuring outputs reflected community perspectives rather than simply translating findings for academic audiences.
Fellows were encouraged to think expansively about format, asking: What will reach the intended audience? What will resonate? This opened the door to accessible, context-rich approaches, allowing community expertise to guide both message and delivery. Dissemination began to take new forms: documentaries, art installations, or facilitated dialogues like story circles. Structured tools helped support this shift, and the team documented these experiences in an article in JPRM.
We also worked with the Fellows to strengthen their ability to tailor communication to a wide range of audiences. Through AcademyHealth-led workshops, Fellows were asked to be very specific about who they wanted to reach, and to ask questions like: Who needs to understand or act on this? What do they already know, and what do they care about? What constraints or pressures are shaping their decisions? From there, they adapted their language and tone, translating technical findings into clear, accessible terms and foregrounding the aspects of their work most relevant to each audience’s priorities. This often meant simplifying without losing accuracy, using concrete examples, and being intentional about what to emphasize versus what to leave in the background. They also paid close attention to context (e.g. tracking current policy debates, community priorities, and media narratives) and asking where their work could be most useful. Rather than approaching dissemination as a one-time output, fellows considered timing, framing, and format: when to share, how to position their findings, and which channels would best reach their intended audience. In practice, this meant aligning their messages with ongoing conversations, identifying points of entry, and being responsive to emerging opportunities to contribute. Dissemination was no longer framed as something done for communities, but something developed with them—grounded in feedback, shaped by lived experience, and aligned with community priorities.
By the later stages of the program, these ideas bore fruit in tangible ways:
- New formats: Fellows experimented with documentaries, story circles, and community-centered events, creating outputs that were interactive, narrative-driven, and rooted in community priorities.
- Stronger messaging tools: AcademyHealth workshops and presentations helped Fellows clarify goals, identify audiences, and choose formats that resonated across community and policy spaces.
- Reinforcement from the field: In Designing and Implementing a Curriculum to Support Health Equity Research Leaders, the team illustrates how early, structured, audience-focused dissemination improves uptake and impact. IRL Fellows put these principles into action, using community-driven, flexible, and context-aware strategies that strengthen both relevance and equity.
Taken together, these examples point to a larger shift. Effective dissemination isn’t just about what is produced. It’s about how you design the process, who you involve, and what you’re trying to make possible. As facilitators of the work, we experienced the lessons firsthand, learning from and with the Fellows and adapting as their needs evolved. When community priorities guide the work, formats are chosen intentionally, and messages are crafted to connect, research is far more likely to drive action.