When engagement numbers are lower than expected, most organizations start in the same place. They ask, "what is wrong with our resource?" Then they get to work on the resource. Better marketing. New name. Refresh of the landing page. Maybe a redesign.
I am not saying these things never matter. Sometimes they are exactly what is needed. But more often, in my experience, this is the wrong starting question, and starting there sends teams down a road that does not get them where they want to go.
The Question Almost Everyone Asks
There is a logic to leading with the resource. The resource is the thing you can see. It is the thing you built. It has a name and a budget and a manager and a Slack channel. When something is not performing, you naturally look at the thing.
The trouble is that engagement is not a property of the resource. Engagement is a property of the relationship between a person and the resource, and a relationship has two ends. If you only look at one end, you only see half of what is going on.
A Project Where Someone Asked a Better One
I want to tell you about a project we did with a community college, because it is a clean example of what happens when an organization is willing to point the question outward instead of inward.
The college has mental health resources for students. The resources are real. They are staffed, they are funded, they are available. But students were not engaging with them at the level the college expected, and the college needed to understand why, both for the students themselves and to support a government funding application.
What I want to flag before going further is that mental health is a topic that deserves care, and the students who participated in this research trusted us with their stories. The specifics belong to the college. What I can share is the shape of how the project worked and the kind of thinking that came out of it.
The question the college brought us was about the space between students and the help that already existed. They wanted to understand what was sitting in that space.
That is a different kind of question than most organizations start with. It does not assume the answer is on the resource side. It does not assume the answer is on the student side. It points at the gap between them and asks what is happening in there.
What Lives in the Space Between
When you point the question that way, things start to come into view that the first question would have missed entirely.
You notice that some students do not know the resource exists in a usable sense. They have seen the name in an orientation packet, but they could not tell you what it offers, or whether it is for someone like them, or how to take the first step.
You notice that some students know exactly what the resource is, and they have decided, for reasons that make complete sense from their vantage point, that it is not for them right now. Maybe a friend had a difficult experience. Maybe the framing language does not match how they would describe what they are going through. Maybe the timing is wrong in a way you would not have predicted.
You notice that some students would use the resource if reaching it were a little easier than it currently is. Not a lot easier. A little. The difference between three steps and two. The difference between a form that takes ten minutes and one that takes three.
None of this is visible if you are looking at the resource. All of it is visible the moment you look at the path.
The Discipline This Asks For
What I am describing is closer to a discipline than a technique. The discipline is hard because it requires sitting with the possibility that the resource you built is fine, and the thing that is not working is something you do not own as cleanly.
It also requires a willingness to do the slower kind of research. The kind where you talk to people, where you watch them try things, where you listen for what they do not say as much as what they do. You cannot run this through a dashboard.
But once you have done it, the next round of work clarifies dramatically. You stop redesigning things that do not need redesigning. You start adjusting the parts of the path that are doing the actual blocking. The same resource, with the same budget, can suddenly perform differently.
A Short List, for the Next Time You Find Yourself Stuck
If your engagement numbers are not where you want them, before you touch the resource, ask:
- Does the person know this exists in a way they could explain it to a friend?
- Does the person know whether it is for them, specifically?
- Does the path to the resource have more steps than the person's motivation can carry?
- Does anything in the framing of the resource accidentally tell the person to keep looking?
These four questions are not exhaustive, and they are not in any particular order. They are the ones I find myself returning to most often.
Available is one word. Accessible is another. The work of an organization that wants its resources to actually reach people is almost entirely the work of closing the distance between those two.
