As advocates, you have surely published a lot of information and data, specifically on the situation that you are confronted with: these can be for example medical studies (like the prevalence of HIV cases), situation reports (like cases of stigma and discrimination that your community has suffered), the effects and impacts of some policies (like the effect of harm reduction programs on HIV prevalence), and many more. 

But however perfect your information, people will choose to access it or not, depending on many factors. 

DEEP DIVE: Information control

 One golden rule in information is that the more people control the information they get, the more they absorb it. So you can start with a poll, a quiz and then send information based on the result. In this example, people are first asked if they are cat lovers or dog lovers. Depending on the answer, they get different information (sometimes it can be as “silly” as just changing a few icons on the page that provides the same information).

Are you a cat person or a dog person?

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This is why your information needs to have two major qualities, which we will unpack in this lesson: 

  • It needs to be so authoritative that people will be inclined to trust it
  • It needs to be put in such a good shape that people will find it compelling

Let’s look at these two aspects in more detail now