Complex Communication for Effective Outreach and Engagement

Outreach and engagement have become increasingly important components of natural resource agency decision-making, management, education, research, and grant writing. We will discuss how to differentiate between outreach and engagement, introduce some communication tools for engagement, as well as share results from a partnered research project with a state agency that investigated how to frame outreach messages to communicate risk of fish diseases to stakeholders. This will serve as a case study of how graduate students can obtain skills in outreach and engagement, enabling them to be effective T-shaped professionals once they enter their professional positions, while they are in graduate school and completing their graduate research.