My path into dissemination was not a single story. With presentations, it was trial by fire. I threw my name in the hat early and started presenting wherever I could — panels, symposia, any opportunity that came up. I sought feedback, kept showing up, and eventually found consistent mentorship that genuinely helped me flourish. With posters, the starting point looked different: I had some natural aptitude for visual design and a foundation from my master’s program, so my early work was relatively strong. But even there, feedback and shaping from more experienced colleagues moved my posters from aesthetically solid to genuinely effective in ways I couldn’t have achieved on my own. Two different starting points. The same conclusion: mentorship matters regardless of where you begin.
That experience shaped how I approach supporting others now. Over the past several years, I’ve guided more than 25 posters through development and supported multiple presenters across panels, symposia, and solo presentations. What I’ve learned is this: starting your journey to disseminating good clinical work doesn’t require a special talent. It requires good data, a clear story, and someone in your corner. Mentorship, whether structured or informal, can be that third ingredient.
Why Dissemination Feels Daunting
For many clinicians, dissemination sits at the intersection of two uncomfortable things: academic writing and public performance. Posters ask us to distill complex clinical work into something someone can absorb in three minutes while holding a cup of coffee. Presentations ask us to stand in front of a room full of peers and make our work sound worth listening to. Both require skills that most of us were never explicitly taught.
The good news is that these are learnable skills. And, like most learnable skills, they develop faster with guidance than without.
Structured Support: Building the Skill Deliberately
Structured mentorship is intentional. It follows a defined path, has clear milestones, and ensures developing presenters aren’t just thrown in at the deep end.
Guided poster-development pathways are among the most effective forms of structured support. Rather than receiving broad feedback on a near-finished poster, clinicians benefit from staged checkpoints: conceptualizing the story first, then developing the abstract, then building out the written components, and finally attending to aesthetics and layout. Each stage has its own learning objectives and builds on the one before. When well supported, this process transforms poster development from a one-time, stressful event into a repeatable clinical skill.
Coaching for focused presentations, particularly the kind of 10–15-minute symposium talk that covers a tight topic, follows similar principles. These presentations have a clear arc: context, methodology, findings, implications. Mentors who have navigated this format can help presenters identify what to cut, how to pace, and where the audience will get lost. That’s not something most people figure out on their own before their first attempt.
Graduated presentation experiences offer another powerful, structured model. This might look like a mentee first contributing a single section of a group presentation, focusing on speaking specifically to their own data or clinical experience, before taking on a co-presenter role and eventually presenting independently. Each step builds both competence and confidence. The first time you stand at a podium and field a question from someone whose work you’ve cited, it helps to have already done a smaller version of that moment.
Unstructured Support: The Value of the Right Relationship
Not all meaningful mentorship happens inside a formal program. Some of the most impactful support comes from relationships: a supervisor who takes the time to sit with a draft, a colleague who has presented at APBA and is willing to talk through what surprised them, or a BCBA-D in your network who offers genuine feedback rather than polite encouragement.
Unstructured mentorship operates through touchpoints rather than timelines. It might be a conversation after a clinical review about how to frame a clinical question for a general audience. It might be an email exchange with a subject matter expert who has published in your area of practice. It might be a mentor who reads a full draft and marks it up without being asked.
This kind of support is less predictable, but it’s often where the real learning happens. Formal programs can scaffold the process; informal mentors often shape the mindset. The clinicians I’ve seen develop the strongest dissemination repertoires almost always had at least one person in their corner who believed the work was worth sharing.
What to Look For and How to Ask
If you’re early in building your dissemination repertoire, the first step is to find out what’s available at your workplace. Some organizations have structured programs, internal review committees, or formal pathways for supporting clinicians who want to present or publish. If yours does, use them. If yours doesn’t, that’s worth naming as a gap, and it’s also not a dead end.
Look around your professional community. Who in your organization or network has presented at conferences you respect? Who has published work in areas adjacent to yours? Most experienced clinicians and researchers are willing to offer support to someone who asks directly and genuinely. Not everyone will say yes, and that’s okay. But the ask itself is worth making.
When you reach out, be specific. “I’m developing a poster on an intervention we’ve been implementing, and I’d value your perspective on the framing” is a better ask than “Can you help me with my poster?” Specificity signals that you’ve already started — and that you’re looking for a thinking partner, not someone to do the work for you.
The Work Is Worth Sharing
I sometimes think about what it would have looked like to have had a mentor early on — someone to tell me that the story came before the slide deck, that a poster is a conversation starter, not a journal article, and that standing in front of an audience gets easier. It would have shortened the learning curve considerably.
But what I’ve come to believe, after guiding others through this process, is that the instinct to share clinical work, to say “this worked, and here’s what we learned”, is already there in most clinicians. It just needs the right conditions to develop.
Dissemination doesn’t have to be daunting. You need good data. You need a clear story. And you need a little guidance and encouragement. Those last two things are available to you, whether through a structured program at your organization or a mentor in your corner who believes your work deserves a place in the room.
Dr. Edward Sanabria serves as Senior Director of Functional Assessment and Treatment Implementation at Centria Healthcare, where he oversees the implementation of their Foundations of Care clinical mentorship. With a Ph.D. in Applied Behavior Analysis from The Chicago School, Dr. Sanabria is passionate about staff development, mentorship, advancing assent-based care, and fostering collaboration to enhance clinical outcomes.
