Bringing the Smart Brevity concept to cyber awareness communications

Cyber awareness has to compete for attention with many things, starting with people’s actual jobs. We are slacked words, texted words, emailed words, tweeted words.

We have about a second to get people’s commitment to keep reading. Axios (an American news site) was able to do the maths and the UX analysis to land on a method that would keep people’s attention for longer. They called it Smart Brevity.

At Monash University, we have combined the learnings from Smart Brevity

1. A short headline
2. A strong first sentence
3. Context/why it matters
4. The choice to learn more

with a commitment to keeping our cyber information local and relevant. Our content and communications is levelling up to “2.0” as we improved our offering to our audience.

This presentation will explore how we tore up our content that defined cyber terms like Malware and Staying Safe Online.. Learn how Monash University mapped the desired cyber safe behaviours to minimise the identified threats to our institution.

See how we rewrote inspired by the Smart Brevity method.

Our cyber awareness pages are now full of white space and are headed with the behaviour we want people to follow (enable MFA!) with these standard sub-headings

• What to do
• How to do it
• Why it matters
• Learn more

We have made cyber awareness information easier to understand and made it simpler for our audience to identify exactly what behaviours they need to follow.