Best Practice of the Month #001 — Communication and outreach
Communication and outreach are not only obligations of your project, they are essential to ensuring people outside of your scientific community are aware of what you are doing. After all, the taxpayers should know what their money is used for!
Communication and outreach are two different topics, yet often complementary.
Communication is about promoting your project and raising awareness on the stakes related to your work. Communication goes one-way: you tell your audience a story, through blog posts, news articles, videos, podcasts, etc.
Outreach, on the other hand, aims to educate a targeted audience on your topic, broadly speaking. Outreach is critical for complex topics where the average person may not have knowledge or understanding. Unlike communication, outreach activities are interactive and involve two-way flow of information, between researchers and the public.
⚠️ There is often some confusion between communication, dissemination and exploitation! While we’ll cover the topics of dissemination and exploitation later, for now we invite you to check out this flyer made by the European Commission.
From the mutualised experience of our network of managers, here are a few key points to help you with regards to communication and outreach:
1. Define and update a communication and outreach plan:
- Make sure this is done early in the project (ideally, within the first 6 months) and hand-in-hand with the researchers;
- Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each party in the plan (management team, scientists, ESRs/DCs, etc.); and keep in mind that, as a manager, you are not responsible for the communication and outreach, and cannot be expected to create content. Your role is to help the researchers build a communication plan, and most importantly, stick to it.
2. Monitor the implementation of the plan:
- Create a communication committee to review the work and assess what needs to be done if objectives are not met. Failure to implement the communication and outreach plan should be considered as a risk of the project;
- Update the plan accordingly (every 6 months);
- Make sure you collect this information for reporting purposes. By having a collated method of collecting these activities from the beginning of the project, you won’t need to scramble when it’s time to write those mid-term, final, or communications-related deliverables!
3. Involve the researchers:
- Provide training on communication and highlight the importance of such skills to motivate them. To do so, involve external consultants or specialists! Plan such training quite early-on in the project, perhaps at the first in-person training;
- Involve researchers in the communication plan and when refining the strategy;
- Involve students once they are recruited, and gather their input for production of materials (blogposts, videos, etc.); give/empower them the lead to organise their own communication activities;
- Make sure their contribution is valued, by giving them visibility (on social network for example). Prizes for “best communicator” can be an incentive for the researchers to contribute more;
- Work in small groups (no need to involve all the researchers/students all time).
🔍 A few examples of communication material that you can prepare during a MSCA project:
- Short videos: facecam interviews, filming researchers at work, animations or ppt presentations
- Self-published written documents: regular updates on the project through blogposts, newsletters, etc.
- Publications in magazines, news websites, etc.
- Oral to the general public or in schools
- Contributing to podcasts or interviews
⚠️ Finally, here is a non-exhaustive list of challenges you should be prepared to face while implementing a communication and outreach plan:
- Motivating the ESRs/DCs: no prior skills, limited time and motivation to contribute
- In the beginning, not much data is produced or ready to be shared. Students can introduce themselves, talk about what their planned research will be, etc. To ‘kick-off’ their participation. As projects progress, more can be shared but time will be harder to come by.
- Motivating the PIs: no time, limited interest, limited skills (?). Perhaps try a ‘PI of the month’ or highlight WP leaders.
- Confidentiality might restrict the communication on the projects (at least until when results are published); in that case, outreach activities can be prioritised
- Research topics can be more or less accessible to the general public, so it is important to gauge the general understanding of your audience towards your topic
💬 Is there anything you would have added to this BP? Any personal experience you would like to share? Let us know in the comments!
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