Becoming a goal-oriented designer and thinker is still one of the biggest challenges of my outreach career. Designing an activity to meet pre-determined goals is incredibly difficult because you need to think about the outcomes/impact of your work before you’ve actually made anything. But once you have those target goals, creating an actual interactive demo becomes way easier.

There are resources available to help you create goals for any communication project, and I’ve listed a few under suggested reading. A lot of these ideas come from education, which in many ways is a specialized form of communication. But here are a few key points I’ve found useful over the years, in case you don’t have time/access to these papers:

1. Keep it brief: list only the 2-4 most crucial goals. This helps you make a demo that is specific and simple enough to be achievable
2. Make the goals reasonable: my demo is not going to teach girls how to operate a mass spectrometer like I do in my lab, and that is okay
3. Keep the goals actionable: each goal should describe something your audience does. “Understand prototyping” is a highly open-ended goal. How would you measure understanding? “Make changes to the machine to change the outcome of their tests” is both less open-ended and something I can observe people doing.
4. Make the goal something you can observe: each goal should have some action you can observe and then respond to. This last recommendation is to help you as the person facilitating the demo. Assessing how your participants are understanding you in real time can help you adjust your work as you go, leading to less confusion and better discussions between participants.

A word of caution: don’t be afraid to throw your goals in the trash when facilitating. Part of facilitating a discussion, rather than demonstrating some facts or concepts from science is that you have to let your audience guide the conversation. Maybe one of your goals with this demo is “make changes to the machine to change the outcome of their tests” but all your participants want to do is run the same test ten times. Maybe they just want to run it once and then leave. Base your discussions off of what your participants are doing. The experience will probably stick with them more, and they’ll probably stick around for longer to chat with you if you do.

You can find more information on setting good outreach goals over on the AAAS website.