In today’s fast-paced research environment, new research often goes unnoticed due to the lack of an efficient science communication strategy. By integrating various channels and outputs to create a cohesive story from your research, a holistic approach ensures that your target audience recognises your project, starts to trust you and eventually your science.
Whether you are starting a new research project or advancing your current one, a holistic science communication strategy can help you connect with your target audience. Together, we can increase your project’s visibility, enhance engagement, facilitate knowledge transfer and convey the real-world impact of your scientific work.
What does a holistic science communication strategy include?
Before starting your science communication project, we need to lay the groundwork. This includes understanding your goals and how to reach them. Hence, at the beginning we will:
- Define the goals of your science communication project
- Define your target audience
- Define your key message
- Create a compelling story to communicate your key message
This is often the most difficult part when creating a new science communication project. Based on these points, we will decide which campaigns to launch to share your project and reach your goals.
Which science communication campaigns should we start?
Since every scientific project is slightly different, each of them needs a unique holistic science communication strategy. Based on your target audience, the key message and goal of your project, we will decide to start any of the following campaigns:
- Create a designated website for your science communication project
- Create guidelines for the design, colour scheme, hashtag usage and visual brand for your project
- Create and publish a science blog, podcast, video channel or webinar series where you regularly share news or research findings
- Optimise your online content for search engines (SEO) so users can find the project using keywords
- Create and publish a newsletter, either on social media or via an email subscription platform, to share your latest news with subscribers
- Start and run one or several social media platforms to share your research project globally and build a community
- Start and run an online community project to connect with your audience and help them make practical use of your research
- Create informative and educational material, such as fact sheets, infographics, posters, ebooks, graphical abstracts, etc to make your research accessible and shareable for different platforms
- Create, sell and ship promotional material or products for your project, such as stickers, bags, cups, etc
- Collaborate with, support or market similar projects, such as conferences, awareness days, open vacancies, research days or community outings, etc
How will we measure the success of the holistic science communication strategy?
Based on the goals of your science communication project, we will define different measurables together, which I will analyse and share with you regularly. Such data will help us understand whether we are reaching your goals and whether the communication project fulfils its purpose. These measurables include the following data and numbers:
- Website visitors and Google Analytics
- Clicks on downloads or external links
- Social media followers, post engagement and interactions with the audience
- Social media shares of your website, blog posts, podcast episodes, videos and newsletters
- Blog, newsletter, podcast or video channel followers or subscribers and webinar attendants
- Nature of feedback, messages and comments on blog and social media posts
- Sign-ups for webinars and online community projects
- Hashtag usage on social media platforms
- Sales and shipments of promotional products
Why should I create your holistic science communication strategy?
After having worked as an academic researcher for several years, I became a science communicator and science writer. My first science communication project was BacterialWorld, an educational blog to tell engaging stories about how bacteria impact our daily lives.
By starting this blog, I learnt how to holistically create an online science communication project, including science writing, website building, social media and email marketing, SEO and follower engagement. Based on this blog, I even created and published a colouring book for children and adults.
Using my experience and willingness to learn more about science communication and find new ways to engage audiences, I took on different clients for whom I created holistic science communication strategies. I created and designed various websites and blogs, optimising them for SEO, and I started and keep running social media accounts to promote these projects and their content. As an additional output, I also keep creating informative, engaging and illustrative material about scientific topics and concepts.
As I enjoy launching novel and far-reaching science communication projects, I would be happy to also help you raise awareness of your research project. By combining different campaigns into a holistic science communication strategy, we make sure that your project will get the attention it deserves.
Reach out (sarah @ microbialcommunications.com) and tell me about your research project and your ideas and thoughts for its dissemination. Together, we can come up with an exciting and holistic science communication strategy!
