On behalf of TOUR4EU (WP9 leader) European People organised a communication course targeted at members of the academic and scientific community working in the field of SSH. Guiding attendees through practical ways in which they can effectively disseminate research outputs in social sciences to wider audiences, the course provided useful communication knowledge through four dedicated online sessions:
Session 1 (10 January 2023 14:00 – 15:30) The Open Research Europe Platform: how to use, explore and make the most of it
Open Research Europe is an open access publishing platform for the publication of research stemming from Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and/or Euratom funding across all subject areas. The platform makes it easy for Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and Euratom beneficiaries to comply with the open access terms of their funding and offers researchers a publishing venue to share their results and insights rapidly and facilitate open, constructive research discussion. This session provided a thorough overview of the platform and its publishing process and will educate attendees about how to make the most of it and its extensive number of features.
Session 2 (17 January 2023 14:00 – 15:30) Digital Communication and social media for science and academia: keeping ahead of the curve
Scientific communication is undergoing a dramatic transition—technologically and conceptually. The expectations of making research results openly available, problems with peer review, emergence of social media as a communication vehicle, and alternative metrics for evaluating impact of research are changing science. How authors write and disseminate their works will determine to a significant extent whether people will be able to find them. This session presented some of the latest advances in modern and digital communication for science and policy and provided practical examples that can be replicated by the attendees within their own working circumstances.
Session 3 (24 January 2023 14:00 – 15:30) Storytelling, narratives and connections for policy and academia
A number of authors interested in how to translate evidence into policy identify the importance of policy narrative and argue that advocates of scientific evidence need to tell good stories to grab the attention and appeal to the emotions of policymakers. Yet, this general call for better narratives is incomplete without concrete examples and evidence of their effectiveness. To ensure research findings are taken up into policy, scientists and social researchers need an understanding of how. information can be told to remain into the minds of target audiences. This session outlined some of the ways in which storytelling and narratives influence policy making and thus the efficiency of policy and science communication.
Session 4 (31 January 2023 14:00 – 15:30) Impact assessment and evaluation for your communication activities
Evaluation should be a key component in any communication strategy. Governments and advocacy. organisations have, in recent decades, poured additional resources into communications campaigns, demanding that their public sector communications campaigns are shown to be ‘necessary, cost efficient and effective.’ Despite high demand, there is limited understanding amongst communication practitioners about how to perform impact assessments (IAs), in both the private and public sectors, partly due to an historic lack of consensus among experts. This session brought together terminology, findings and recommendations from the private and public sectors and academia to synthesise a set of five general steps for practitioners when performing IAs.
The recordings and the presentations of the training course course can be found at the following LINK