Festival planning kicks off with first in series of public engagement workshops

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The build up to this year's Imperial Festival got off to a sociable start at a workshop to help scientists talk about their work via social media.

Around 50 staff and students gathered to hear from Simon Levey and Michael Jones from the College’s Research Communications group, and to share their ideas and experience of using social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, to get the public engaged with their research.

The lunchtime session was the first in a series of six workshops designed to help researchers think about new ways of communicating about their research at the Imperial Festival, and at other public events.

Following on from the growing success of the last three years, this year’s Imperial Festival will be taking place over the whole weekend for the first time this year, from Saturday 9 to Sunday 10 May.

The workshop included a whistle-stop tour of the main concepts and considerations for setting up and running social media accounts for engaging broader audiences in conversations about research.

The slides are now available to download here. (College log-in required)

Participants used what they had learnt, along with their own experience to design a post or series of posts promoting next Thursday’s event Imperial Fringe: Lit Up, using the hashtag #impfringe.

The winning group devised an Instagram post, based on the popular ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirts called ‘This is what a scientist looks like’, linking through to the exhibit at the event where visitors will get to draw their impressions of a scientist with Imperial’s MSc Science Communications students.

“I really enjoyed the workshop,” said Julia Coffey, public involvement coordinator from the Royal Brompton Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit. “It’s not an area I currently use much in my work  except for YouTube and Twitter so it’s definitely opened my eyes to explore more ways to use it in future – particularly Instagram.”

The weekly workshops take place on Wednesday lunchtimes (12:30-13:30) on the South Kensington Campus. 

Funded by the Wellcome Trust’s Institutional Strategic Support Fund, they aim to develop communication skills as well as grow and strengthen the community of researchers interested in public engagement at the College. Next week’s workshop is about interactive demonstrations at festivals and other public engagement environments.