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Welcome to Talking Health!
By the end of this course you will be able to:
- Explain why effective, audience-centered communication is essential to building trust and understanding in public health.
- Recognize common communication gaps and overlaps between public health and the communities or sectors we serve.
- Apply tools to make your public health messages relatable and audience centered.
- Develop compelling public health stories that connect context, data, and values to inspire action.
- Describe methods to test, refine, and evaluate public health messages to ensure they are accessible, trustworthy, and resonate with target audiences.
This course is made up of five modules, each building on the last. Plan to spend about 30–45 minutes per module.
Module 1 — Making the Case for Public Health Communications
Explore why communication skills are key to effective public health and how poor communication fosters confusion, mistrust, and misinformation. Then learn how every public health professional can help build understanding and trust through clear, effective communication.
Module 2 — Bridging Gaps in Public Health Communication
Discuss common misunderstandings about public health and learn the five Big Ideas that explain what public health is, what it does, and why it matters. Explore how public health connects with other sectors through shared values and understandings like safe housing, strong schools, healthy workplaces, and community wellbeing.
Module 3 — Creating Audience-Focused Messages
Learn how to move beyond the insular language of the public health world by understanding your audience and crafting messages that are clear, relevant, and meaningful. Practice using the H.E.A.R.T. framework and making powerful language choices that help audiences feel, believe, see, and share your message.
Module 4 — Storytelling
Build compelling stories that connect people, problems, solutions, impact and a call to action. Infuse your messages with powerful shared values – Potential & possibility, Efficacy, Agency, and Honoring humanity. Finally, learn how to simplify data and create concise, memorable messages that inspire action.
Module 5 — Message Testing
Discover practical ways to test your messages before you share them broadly. Learn simple methods for gathering feedback, refining your communications, and ensuring your message resonates with the people you want to reach.
Modules and Lessons
Each module contains short videos lessons, self-reflection, and application exercises that you can complete at your own pace.
Application Exercises
Throughout the modules, you will complete knowledge application exercises written to reinforce the material covered thus far. These exercises are scenario-based, and will not be graded.
Self-Reflections
The modules also feature self-reflection prompts that ask you to think deeper about the course content and its application to your own work and community. Self-reflection questions are not graded because there is no right or wrong answer.
Capstone
The Talking Health course aims to support you to apply the skills you’re learning to your own work. Your Capstone project gives you the opportunity to dive deeper into one of your current public health communication challenges and brainstorm effective solutions. You will work through elements of the capstone in each module.
At the end of the course, your responses to the capstone questions will be compiled in a workbook-style document for you to download!
Resources
To support note-taking and completion of Application exercises, we are providing:
- A printable Course Companion Notebook if you want to take notes by hand.
- An electronic version of the Course Companion Notebook if you prefer to take notes on your computer.
- A Capstone Companion to allow you to work through the Capstone with the full context in mind, and so you can use this in any future messaging projects.
You can download printable and editable course resource documents anywhere you see a Materials tab in a lesson page.
Certificate
When you finish the course, you will receive a downloadable course completion certificate!
Questions or Technical Issues?
Please visit the Technical Support page for information on navigating the course and solutions to common technical issues. If you experience any technical problems not addressed on support page, or have questions about the course content, contact us at talkinghealth@debeaumont.org.