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Diffusion of innovations and video.
A great combination.
Suppose you were tasked with training people how to do something they had never heard of before? What mediums would help them best?
Sharing new ideas about health, agriculture, or livelihoods is a critical component of development. Ensuring that we do so in the most effective way can make our development efforts more effective, and expand their reach. Often the budget does not exist to hire enough specialists to train the entire target community in person, but more than that, local community members are the ones who can communicate these changes best. That's why putting the message into the right hands, with the right medium, is so important. Those are the goals of our Multimedia Resource Sharing project in Africa.
Diffusion of innovations research offers a rich source of knowledge about development communications. Beginning in the 1950's with agricultural extension work, it has been adapted around the globe to many different contexts and content. One key finding is that how a message is communicated is even more important to its adoption than its effectiveness. Diffusion of innovations research offers tangible lessons on communicating effectively so that helpful technologies don't get lost in the telling.
At the same time, audiovisual materials have been shown to increase retention rates to 50%, up from only 10% for reading, and 20% for only hearing a message. More than that, when you rely on the "ripple effect" to spread an innovation through a community, sometimes only 14% of the message reaches the second generation of learners, and 25% of it may be distorted. Digital communications — especially audiovisual ones — can greatly increase the success of people trying to learn how to prevent HIV/AIDS, preserve produce, or use a new type of stove.
Lessons from diffusion of innovations research can make our video content more impactful. Adding audiovisual support materials to our training and outreach programs can improve our development impacts. They both strengthen each other. As video becomes much easier to afford, learn, and distribute (online or offline), we should look again at using it more for development work. The research we shared on Digitally Assisted Diffusion of Innovations at the Fourth Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning offers more practical tips on how to do so more effectively.
Sharing research and results
to improve your end results.
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