communications

Target audiences

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

My mother received the email posted below this morning. She’s good with computers – she shops online, keeps in touch with her friends via email, and uses Google to look for medical information. She’s comfortable, in short, with the internet.

When she got this email, she was outraged. She thought it was an attempt to prey on the poor and uneducated, and that citing medical authorities must be some kind of unethical.

I thought it was hysterical, and asked her to forward it to me so I could read it and snicker.

To be fair to my mom, neither of us remembered it was April first. She might have had more of a sense of humor if she’d remembered. I’m not sure, though. I think this email was a misjudgment of their audience. Allegro medical sells home medical supplies like walkers, heating pads, and adaptive technology. Most of their target market is either old or sick. How many of them have the kind of lives that remember and enjoy April Fool’s day?

Lesson: Know your audience very, very well before you send your message.

——————-

From: Craig Hood
Date: 01 Apr 2008 00:17:25 -0700
Subject: Breakthrough Study Reveals Important Link
To: xxxx.shaikh@gmail.com

Hello Marylin,

The New England Medical Center in conjunction with the Harvard Journal of Medicine published a document today noting that people who shop at AllegroMedical.com tend to be smarter and better looking than most. The control group of non-Allegro shoppers were also found to exhibit poor hygiene skills in addition to lower cognitive abilities. “More studies are required as we can’t yet pinpoint whether smart, good looking people simply choose to shop at Allegro Medical or people who shop at Allegro Medical somehow become smarter and better looking,” says researchers conducting the study.

Upon learning of this groundbreaking study, the team at Allegro Medical is here to celebrate your “smarterness” by offering all smart Allegro Shoppers $10 off their next purchase of over $100. It’s no joke, Just use the code “Smart10” today through Tuesday, April 8, 2008.

Good hygiene, like smart shopping is a learned skill. So if you know anyone suffering from poor shopping practices, help’m out by forwarding this limited time deal on to friends or family in need.

Sincerely,

Craig Hood
President/Founder
Allegro Medical
800-861-3211 ext 121

Hopefully this is the most interesting email you have ever received. However, if you would rather not receive future e-mails or advertisements from me or the crew, please visit the opt-out link here: click here. Allegro Medical, 1833 W Main St, #131, Mesa, AZ, 85201
Please note that this message was sent to the following email address: xxxxx.shaikh@gmail.com

Two on Tuesday – Tuberculosis

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

Yesterday was world TB Day. In honor, I’ll offer two resources about multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis. MDR TB is very very scary. It also shows the challenges of any kind of health treatment program. It’s hard to keep patients in engaged in a long course of treatment and it is highly infectious.

This article talks about MDR TB in the Kyrgyz Republic. As an added bonus, using an x-ray to diagnose TB, as described in the article, is not all that accurate. You can’t identify specific strains. You really need sputum smear microscopy to make it work.

For more information on MDR TB, you can check the WHO MDR TB report. I attended the presentation of the report in DC and it’s both seriously researched and as frightening as one would expect.

An addendum: Another interesting TB document: notes on communicating with the media about TB. The WHO did a brilliant job of this, as their fairly dry report on a technical medical topic got all kinds of news coverage, including the New York Times.

The Cute Cat Theory of technology

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech. Wow, do I love Ethan Zuckerman’s blog. His approach to blogging is similar to mine, in that he tries to bring together a lot of ideas to improve development practice in the field. He does it a lot better, though, and writes meaty posts full of interesting analysis.

This post, on the use of new technologies, is one of the most insightful things I’ve read in a long, long time.

Project HOPE’s blog

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

Project HOPE In the Field is Project HOPE’s blog. It’s a nice effort on their part, in terms of what’s on there. Appealing first-person content, with plenty of action photos. It’s not sanctimonious or stuffy and not gratuitous with beneficiary pictures. It has a donate link after every entry to let you support the exact work you are reading about.

But here’s the thing – it’s hosted on blogger, of all places, using an only slightly modified template. You’d think it was just one volunteer’s effort if not for the official links and pictures. It looks amateurish.

If they are going to the effort of having an official blog, why not incorporate the blog into their main site? It would give people a reason to keep coming back to the site, and I would bet that every visit increases the chance that someone will donate. They must have a web designer; it wouldn’t be that hard to have them build in a blog and appropriate functionality.

It’s a very strange choice. Old-fashioned, and out of touch with how people actually use the web.

Information for Advocacy

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

Communicating complicated concepts in an accessible way is one of the most important things a project can do, and one of the hardest. It’s very easy to get seduced by a pretty graph and fail to realize that it doesn’t convey your information in a useful way.

Sometimes we are just too deep inside our topics to be as clear and succinct as we need to be with donors, stakeholders, host governments, or other people who need to understand out work. The Stanford Social Innovation Review refers to the problem in their blog.

This handbook – Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design is a great guide to presenting data in an effective way. The tactical tech website in general is a gold mine of useful advice. I also really like Security for Human Rights Defenders.

Depo Provera is not infected with HIV

By Alanna Shaikh | | 0 Comments |

The poor public affairs officer must be really frustrated to give interviews on a subject this ridiculous. There’s a rumor spreading in Zambia that the USAID-distributed Depo Provera (injectable contraceptive) is infected with the HIV virus. A rumor being promulgated by the Minister of Health, Brian Chituwo. There is a BBC article from 2006 that says he’s been moved into the Ministry of Education, but apparently he wasn’t.

I am not really sure what lesson to learn from this. Well, one maybe. In a well-educated society with access to information, these kinds of rumors are not able to take flight.