You may or may not have already discovered that the Global Health Council posts a quarterly newsletter for communications professionals working in the field. The newsletter covers communications efforts, message development on global health topics, a calendar of upcoming events and new tools for communicators.

This issue focuses on shortages in the health care workforce in particular, with an eye toward how communicators can help audiences understand the issue. The newsletter's writers acknowledge that right away we run up against a lot of complexity. In an article on "Making What We Do Compelling to Our Audience," Bruce Curran offers an interesting twist on the idea that all you really need is a compelling story to sell your issue:

To get the message out we should not be striving to make what is complex and difficult compelling, rather we should be trying to make what is compelling relevant to the complex topic and to our audience.

This rings of "social math" to me -- it's not wise to either overwhelm with a mound of facts and figures on the one hand or underwhelm with a simple-minded story on the other. Later in Curran's article, he gives a great example of how one person's story can shed light on a bigger issue without dumbing it down. In this case, the issue is Sudan's lack of doctors:

Daniel Madit Thon Duop left the Sudan over 20 years ago as a teenager to obtain an education and someday return to help his country. Recently, he and 14 other young physicians have returned to Southern Sudan to start working in the south’s severely damaged health sector. Normally the addition of 15 doctors would not seem significant, but in a country where there are only 50 doctors for nearly 10 million people, that is a 30 percent increase in capacity. The simplicity of the story makes a point without getting tied up in the complexity of the development issue.