Play 9: Communicate Your Progress

If you want to increase the reach of your effort, external communications will be a major component of your work. You’ll want to share information with the public about who you are, what you’re doing, how others can support your initiative, and—most importantly—the progress you’ve made toward achieving your vision. This can be done through social media, publishing articles and blogs, presenting at conferences, building partnerships, and more.

Don't wait!

You can use this play throughout the lifecycle of your initiative to communicate your success along the way. You do not need to wait until the finish line!

TIPS

  • Expand Your Communications Plan: Review what you’ve already added to your communications plan; you’ll want to determine how you want to communicate with the public and what you want to communicate.
  • Identify Activities: Determine which engagement activities you want to launch for communicating with the public (your external communications). Add activities to your communications planning document, which might include presenting at workshops and conferences to expand the reach of your messages and hosting events. It can be helpful to prioritize activities to ensure you’re focusing on what’s most important with the time you have available.
  • Choose Your External Channels: Determine which external channels you want to use to reach the public. You might launch a website, leverage social media channels (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook), send a newsletter to stakeholders, or present at industry conferences and forums.
  • Keep in Mind: Try not to spend time creating content for channels that your stakeholders infrequently visit. For instance, if stakeholders are not Facebook users, you do not have to spend time drafting and publishing posts to this channel.
  • Ensure Content is Accessible: It bears repeating that accessibility should be at the center of all your activities. Make sure the content you publish on your external channels is as accessible as possible. (Learn the basics of creating accessible content from PEAT).
  • Diversify Content: Create original content to publish on your channels to help show the expertise of your community, making sure to diversify the information you share to keep the public engaged. You can publish interesting articles on technology and accessibility, release a survey you created online, share new guidelines released for another emerging technology, and update stakeholders on what your community is doing.
  • Create Two-Way Communication: Try to engage in two-way communication with the public. Ask them questions, invite them to join an event, and seek their input for surveys and to learn about how your initiative is progressing.

Guiding Questions to Get You Started:

  1. What is your approach to communicating with the public?
  2. What do you want the public to know about your approach? Why?
  3. Which external communication activities do you want to engage in? Which activities are essential?
  4. Which channels do your stakeholders use to acquire information and openly engage with other stakeholders?
  5. How can you ensure the accessibility of all resources and products you publish or release?
  6. How will you engage the public in your current activities?
  7. Which types of content can you share?
  8. Are there ways the public can contribute to your work?

Now What?

After going through these plays, do you have experiences and lessons learned to share with other emerging technology leaders? Do you have lingering questions on how to approach the plays or need advice on how to design for accessibility? Do you have technical questions about how to develop accessible content, hardware, software, or platforms? Reach out to the PEAT team with questions at info@peatworks.org. We wish you good luck in your efforts to develop the accessible emerging technologies of the future!

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