Audience Research and Strategic Messaging to Reach Busy Educators
“The Hatcher Group has been an outstanding partner in work that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has entrusted us with at Mass Insight. Their expertise, responsiveness, and attentiveness has been instrumental to this work. I admire and appreciate the profound respect Hatcher has demonstrated for educators and their needs. I’m convinced they are the best partners we could have found to conceptualize and execute this work.”
– Client
Overview
Mass Insight (Mi) is in the business of school improvement. They knew their research-based approaches and tools around Advanced Placement (AP) equity and continuous improvement could help students and schools, but sought support in increasing their uptake and impact. Key to achieving this goal was deeply understanding educator perceptions and attitudes and creating targeted messaging that appealed to their needs. For this, Mass Insight turned to Hatcher.
Challenge
Mi hoped to address challenges in two areas. The first was around educator perceptions and understanding of continuous improvement, a cyclical process in which educators collaborate to develop, test, and refine solutions to persistent problems. Too many educators have misconceptions about what it is or remain unaware of its value. There has also been a lack of alignment in the field about how to effectively communicate about continuous improvement. Mi sought support in creating a strong and cohesive narrative that increases educators’ awareness of continuous improvement’s value and, ultimately, promotes broader uptake of the method.
The second focus area was Mi’s AP Equity Building Tools. Mi developed these tools to help educators and school leaders support students who are underserved in AP courses, particularly students who are Black, Latino, or from low-income backgrounds. Mi needed support in cutting through the clutter of educator resources to reach an audience who is overwhelmed and has limited bandwidth.
Solution
Based on in-depth audience research, Hatcher developed two well-received messaging and communications guides that the client and their funder are working to disseminate to the field. The recommendations and messaging in the guides are rooted in insights from almost 600 survey responses and 66 focus group participants that were comprised of educators at all levels across the country. The guides will help Mass Insight increase educator use of its tools to help students succeed in AP courses and support to uptake of continuous improvement to solve education’s most pressing challenges.
The final product: Two robust messaging and communications guides that include research findings, messaging recommendations, sample language, and frameworks to help the field broaden educators’ understanding and increase their adoption of continuous improvement and AP Equity Building Tools.
Building Messaging Tools that Resonate
Hatcher addressed these challenges in multiple phases. Working closely with the research firm OpinionWorks, Hatcher conducted two phases of audience research. The first phase featured nationally distributed surveys to rapidly elicit educators’ general experiences, perceptions, and attitudes. Using the insights from the surveys, the team then conducted focus groups with teachers and administrators to explore the survey findings more in-depth. In the second phase, Hatcher drafted messaging based on the initial research findings. We then conducted another round of focus groups to test the messaging and work with research participants to co-create and refine messaging that resonated.
Empowering Voices for Action and Impact
From there, we developed robust communications and messaging guides for use by Mi and the broader education field. Each guide serves as a single source of research findings, messaging recommendations, and sample language. They are designed to support a variety of use case scenarios, such as one-on-one conversations with a school district, e-newsletter content, and conference presentations. We also helped Mi develop a new name for their AP Equity Building Tools based on the research findings—AP Success Tools.
Finally, we are working with Mi to socialize the guides with their staff and the field through presentations and consultations with leading organizations.
Impact
The client said: “The guide does an impeccable job at translating our research findings into customizable CI messaging. I really appreciated the tone, the flow, and overall content. I really believe this is going to be a great contribution to the field. Thank you for all the amazing work you all have done! I’m proud of what we have accomplished and eager to socialize this product.”
Critical to reaching Mass Insight’s impact goals is dissemination and uptake of the guides. Hatcher worked with Mass Insight to present the research and guides at conferences and with leading organizations in the continuous improvement field. Hatcher has co-presented at the Carnegie Summit and a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation continuous improvement conference, along with virtual presentations for a number of school improvement partners. We also worked alongside Mass Insight to provide customized consultative support to several continuous improvement organizations who are leading the field in this work. Through these consultations, we help organizations more deeply understand the research findings and leverage them to elevate their messaging and communications strategies.
Capabilities
Audience development
Content
Graphic design
Qualitative research
Quantitative research
Strategic communications