Avoiding the PDF graveyard: best practices for ensuring your findings reach (and are actually used) by your target audience

The digital health community dedicates significant resources to implementation, monitoring, evaluation and research activities and then publishing the results. While these publications are meant to share learnings and transfer knowledge to help implementers, policymakers and donors design and carry out their work more effectively, do they ever actually reach their intended audience and get read? And, more importantly, applied? In 2014, the World Bank analyzed their web traffic and found that nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded and another 40 percent had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. How do we as a community, move from publishing a PDF on a website and hoping it gets downloaded, to making sure our findings are actively distributed and used to design future programming? In this interactive workshop, the engagement team from PATH's Center of Digital and Data Excellence will share what they have learned when successfully disseminating actionable findings from four projects: Immunization Data: Evidence For Action; the Joint Learning Network for Universal Health Coverage; the BID Initiative; and Introducing Digital Immunization Information Systems–Exchange And Learning from Vietnam. The presenters will share how PATH was able to identify and reach each project's target audience and increase the uptake and use of evidence through advocacy and communication approaches including social media campaigns and peer learning networks. Through an activity, attendees will share their successes and failures with disseminating their publications and findings. All attendees will leave the session with ideas for how they can effectively disseminate findings to ensure they reach their target audience, are applied to future programming and help move forward the field of digital health.