If you do not have an audience, you do not have an ECHO. Marketing is how you find the people your program is built for, and you cannot build a community without understanding who they are. This guide covers a simple way to define and pitch your program, how to profile your audience, how to plan your communications and how to get your story in front of the wider ECHO community.
This article is adapted from “Marketing Your ECHO,” a session of the ECHO Institute’s Partner Launch Training presented by its Communications and Marketing team. The team amplifies the impact of the ECHO community through its website, articles, news releases, newsletters and social media, and offers guidance, templates and marketing support to ECHO partners.
Decide who owns communications
Before anything else, answer one question: who is responsible for marketing and communications on your team? It does not have to be a full-time role, but someone should own it. Without a named person, recruitment emails go out late, flyers are inconsistent and nobody notices when the program page is out of date.
Define your program
Use the birthday party invite method. A good invitation answers five questions, and so should your program description:
- Who? Your organization and what you do.
- What? Your ECHO topic and its purpose.
- Why? Why your audience should care.
- Where? How people join, whether on Zoom through iECHO or elsewhere.
- When? Day, time and cadence.
Turn it into a pitch
Use those answers to write an elevator pitch. You will reach for it constantly: with funders, when recruiting participants, when asking for cases and when looking for didactic speakers.
Here is how the ECHO Institute describes its own MetaECHO Community:
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who? | MetaECHO Community, a global network of ECHO partners |
| What? | Shares information, highlights and innovations |
| Why? | To further the ECHO mission |
| Where and when? | A regular newsletter, monthly virtual calls and conferences |
The MetaECHO Community is a global network of partners committed to sharing information and furthering the ECHO mission through newsletters, monthly virtual calls and conferences across the world.
Identify your audience
The best way to identify your audience is to write down answers to these questions. They sound similar, but you should be able to give a different answer to each:
- Who would be interested in your ECHO topic? Who would benefit most?
- What is your “big picture”? Who shares those goals?
- What is unique to your ECHO?
- What do similar ECHO programs do, and who attends them?
Build an audience profile
Then turn the answers into a profile that covers both demographics (who they are) and psychographics (what drives them). The MetaECHO Community’s profile is a useful template:
| What to capture | MetaECHO Community example | |
|---|---|---|
| Demographics | Age, location, profession, education | Ages 25 to 67; worldwide; health care and education professionals; college degrees |
| Psychographics | Interests, values, goals, habits, struggles and problems | Interested in ECHO; value spreading information and awareness to all communities; goal of operating successful ECHO programs; struggle to find time in a busy schedule to participate |
The “struggles” line is often the most useful. If your audience’s biggest problem is time, your messaging should lead with how little of it your program asks for.
Develop your communications
Every piece of communication should have a specific purpose and an intended audience. Go back to the birthday party invite: who is this for, and what do you want them to do? Then choose the channels that reach them:
- Social media, from your organization’s accounts and your hub team’s own networks
- Email, including Quick Email to people already in iECHO
- iECHO, where a public program page and announcements reach participants where they already are
- Partner organizations, professional associations and networks that already talk to your audience
- News media, local and trade
Resources
- Templates and guidance are available in the Project ECHO Resource Library (PERL).
- Canva is a good tool for designing graphics and flyers.
- Do not use AI-generated images for graphics and flyers.
- Follow the branding guidelines. The self-paced course Marketing with ECHO: A Step-by-Step Approach walks through them.
Plug into the ECHO community
The MetaECHO Community is the network of every ECHO partner. It is where you learn what other hubs are doing and where your own work gets noticed.
- Community call (monthly). Hear highlights, innovations and information from fellow partners and the ECHO Institute. All hub members are encouraged to attend. Register each month on iECHO.
- Newsletter. Updates, new launches, stories, milestones, participant recruiting, training resources and more. Sign up here.
- Conferences. In-person gatherings where the ECHO Institute and partners meet to learn from each other.
Share your story
The Communications and Marketing team wants to tell your story. A few ways to make that happen:
- Share and tag on social media: Instagram @ProjectECHOhq, LinkedIn Project ECHO, X @ProjectECHO and Facebook Project ECHO.
- Pitch a story or article for the Stories page by emailing projectechocomms@salud.unm.edu.
- Present to other partners on a MetaECHO Community call. Contact the team at the same address to be put in touch with the MetaECHO coordinator.
- Be part of the Impact Report, which highlights partner work every year.
You can also post updates on your organization’s iECHO profile; see ECHO stories and updates.