There’s a seductive logic behind most institutional science communication: if people just understood the research, they’d support it. Fund it. Act on it. You produce the findings. You make them clear. The rest follows.
It doesn’t follow. And the gap between what research institutions believe about science communication and what the evidence actually shows has real consequences for funding, for policy influence, and for the scientists whose work deserves to matter beyond the lab.
The people you want to reach are not your “audience.” An audience sits in seats and watches the show. The people you need in public interest work are actors — individuals with the agency, motivation, and capacity to take meaningful action. Reaching them takes more than clarity. It takes strategy.
The model most institutions use is broken at its foundation.
In 1992, sociologist Brian Wynne named the dominant approach to science communication the “deficit model”: the assumption that public resistance to scientific findings is primarily a knowledge problem. Fill the deficit. Explain better. Show your work. Trust will follow.
Decades of research have dismantled this assumption. Wynne’s own case study of Cumbrian sheep farmers showed that the problem was never about information. The farmers understood the science perfectly well and still rejected the advice of institutional scientists, because they had legitimate reasons not to trust the institutions delivering it. The barrier was about relationships, credibility, and social context. Not comprehension.
Dietram Scheufele, writing in PNAS in 2014, went further. Science communication doesn’t take place in a neutral information environment. It takes place in a political one. How actors receive scientific findings is shaped by who delivers them, through which channels, and what values those actors already hold. More data doesn’t solve that problem. A communications strategy might.
Most research institutions still operate on the deficit model. They invest in science communication as a translation problem: make it simpler, make it cleaner, put it in a press release. What they don’t invest in is the harder question. Who, exactly, are we trying to move? And what would actually move them?
The resulting outcomes are predictable.
When institutions skip the strategic thinking, two problems follow reliably.
First, they communicate to everyone, which means they communicate to no one in particular. A message designed simultaneously for a major donor, a policymaker, a journalist, and a graduate student is optimized for none of them. Effective communication starts with a narrow, honest answer to the question: who has the agency and motivation to take the specific action we need?
Second, they put scientists in front of actors who aren’t yet prepared to trust scientists. Credibility isn’t built by credentials. It’s built through relationships and shared values. Research on source credibility shows that who delivers a message shapes how it lands just as powerfully as the message itself. Putting a brilliant scientist in a room with a skeptical funder and hoping the data does the work is not a communications strategy. It’s a wish.
The science communication problem, at its core, is a strategy problem. Training helps. But training that precedes strategy is training aimed in the wrong direction.
What it looks like when the approach changes.
When the Center for Public Interest Communications partnered with the Florida Museum of Natural History, the goal wasn’t to help scientists explain their research. It was to help them tell stories capable of moving specific actors: major donors and institutional funders with the capacity to support the museum’s next generation of scientific initiatives.
Those are different goals. They require different approaches.
Working with a cohort of museum scientists, the Center applied the Science of What Makes People Care and the Science of Story Building to help each researcher identify not just what their work is, but what it means to someone who isn’t already a scientist. What emotions does it invite? What values does it connect to? Whose story is it, beyond the lab?
The results were stories that earned attention precisely because they didn’t lead with findings.
Curator of Ornithology Glaucia Del-Rio connected her Amazon fieldwork to a discovery no one expected: a gene governing reproductive failure in Amazonian birds is the same gene implicated in an aggressive form of ovarian cancer in humans. A bird’s vanishing in the Amazon and a woman’s illness in a hospital room share a molecular root. That’s not a summary of research findings. It’s a story that opens a door.
Curator Michelle LeFebvre grounded 15,000 years of Florida coastal history in the lived experience of someone whose car is perpetually sandy and whose children swing from centuries-old oak trees. She connected that heritage, personally and viscerally, to the museum’s capacity to help Florida navigate its future.
These aren’t softer versions of the science. They’re more strategic ones. They identify who needs to care, then work backward to what will make them care. That’s the Science of What Makes People Care in practice, and it’s what separates science communication that lands from science communication that doesn’t.
Strategy first. Training follows.
The Center’s approach isn’t training-first. It’s strategy-first.
Before any workshop, any coaching session, any story development, the question is always: who are the actors you need to move, what action do you need them to take, and what would actually motivate that action? The frameworks the Center brings, including the Four Questions: the Back of the Envelope Guide to Strategy and the Six Spheres of Influence, exist to make that thinking rigorous and repeatable, not to replace it with a formula.
Training built on that foundation produces scientists and communicators who don’t just tell better stories. They tell the right stories, to the right people, through the right channels, and they know why each of those choices matters.
For research institutions ready to build that capacity, the Center for Public Interest Communications offers two paths.
Custom engagements bring the Center’s team directly to your institution to work with your scientists, communicators, and leadership on the specific strategic communications challenges you’re facing. Like the Florida Museum partnership, these engagements combine strategic diagnosis, workshop-based training, one-on-one coaching, and story development into a program designed around your goals.
The Strategic Communications Academy experience, adapted for research university contexts, brings the Center’s flagship training to your scientists and communicators, grounding them in the science of strategic communication, story, and influence in a format designed for researchers and scholars.
If your scientists’ findings deserve to matter beyond the lab, and they do, the question isn’t whether to invest in science communication. It’s whether to invest in it strategically.