Evaluating Science Communication Activities
This page provides a list of topics and questions that others have found useful to consider when trying to improve the effect of science communication activities. The aim of these questions is to get you thinking around the ways you communicate with others and the kinds of factors that might be important if you want to improve the effect of what you do.
A second associated page sets out some of the things that we already know about communicating scientific research from reviewing literature and from the experiences of groups within Landcare Research of developing and implementing communication strategies for the various science outcome areas.
On this page:
Considerations for communicating better.
How is your communication
working now?
Who should you communicate with?
How and what can you learn from
those with whom you are communicating?
Why exactly are
you are communicating?
How and what can you learn from
those with whom you are communicating?
Reflecting on your relationships
with end user groups .
The difficulty
of changing.
How do you know when you have communicated
well?
Do you use your social and
professional networks to best effect?
How can you use each communication
activity to maximum benefit?
What
do you know about people and information within your own organisation?
Considerations for evaluating your own communication
The following are some useful questions for thinking about your own communication practices.
How is your communication working now?
- How do you currently plan, monitor and review your communication work?
- What feedback to you seek and from whom?
- Why them?
- What barriers and opportunities exist in your communication with others
and theirs with you?
- e.g. time, timing, availability, geographical distance, skills, knowledge
- How do you know when you have communicated well?
- What are you using to assess this?
- What communication types do you currently use?
- How do different activities complement each other?
- Do you have the appropriate suite of activities for today's world of websites, electronic searches and people who are becoming less inclined to use information that they have to wait to receive?
- How can you use each communication activity to maximum benefit?
Who should you communicate with?
- Have you thought carefully about who your stakeholders are?
- Are your end users your only stakeholders?
- Have you spent a few minutes doing a stakeholder analysis ?
- What is their current interest in the information?
Why exactly are you are communicating?
- What purposes do you have for communicating with different groups?
- Are you trying to:
- raise awareness,
- persuade people to change their behaviour,
- change the way people understand their problem,
- work towards developing best practice?
- Is you communication with them appropriate for that purpose?
- How complex is your information?
- Is it simple and easily incorporated into what happens now, or
- Is it more complex,
- What level of understanding and engagement does it require from both sides?
- Are your communication media effective and appropriate for your particular
purposes?
- What indicators are you using to assess effectiveness and appropriateness?
How and what can you learn from those with whom you are communicating?
- What time have you spent listening to your end users?
- How have you used active listening in your communication?
- How much do you know about the work of end users?
- What is your understanding of their work and do they describe their work the same way?
- What is the context of their work?
- What exactly do they do?
- What pressures do they face?
- Who do they deal with day to day?
- Why do they want your information?
- What knowledge are each of you assuming that the other has and are these assumptions always correct?
- Do you both use the same terminology? Are you sure it means the same to both of you?
- How have you used active listening in your communication(!)
- How do you know? Did you get your information directly from them?
... and what they know about the context of their work
- What expertise do your different end users have:
- about the problem in hand?
- about the managerial environment?
- about the costs of change?
- about their ability to learn?
- about the wider ecological and social systems within which the problem lies?
- How do they define the problem at hand?
- What frustrations do they strike in their work?
- What barriers and opportunities are there to them taking up your information?
- How can you work with others to deal with these?
Reflecting on your relationships with end user groups
- Do you see the relevance of the information your end user groups have?
- If not, have you asked them the right questions?
- What are the things that you have learned from your end user groups?
- Who are the people that you most easily engage with from other disciplines and other work areas?
- Why is that?
- How and how often do you seek feedback ?
- Do your end users want you to change?
- How do they want you to change?
- Why do they want you to change?
- Do different groups want you to change differently?
- What stage of change are the people you are communcating with at (Click here for an outline of stages of change )?
- What level of trust have they in your information?
- What is their stake in changing or not changing?
- Specifically which bits of information are they most interested in?
- Who are the good networkers in the relevant system?
- What do they want from you other than your information?
The difficulty of changing
To understand more about change, it can be useful to think about a recent occasion on which you tried to change something that impacts on you regularly.
- When and why did you decide to change?
- How did you go about making the change?
- How many tries did it take to work out what to do, what would work for you?
- Did you manage to maintain the change from your first attempt at doing so?
- What other factors impinged on this change?
- What did you have to give up to make the change?
- If you have maintained the change, what keeps you doing it?
- Can you compare a time when you directed and choreographed a change (did it even feel like change?) with one in which you were required to change (what did that feel like?)
Chances are that other people have similar experiences to what you do when trying to change.
How do you know when you have communicated well?
- How do you get feedback ?
- What feedback do you seek from the people you communicate with?
- Is the way you seek that feedback getting honest and useful information to help you improve?
- How do you use that information?
- How do you show people that you have used their feedback?
- Is it possible to get feedback through a third party who may give you another perspective on your communication?
- How do you manage getting constructive feedback from stakeholders who may not like giving criticism or who may be uncertain about how best to give it?
- How do you manage your own feelings in relation to getting feedback?
Do you use your social and professional networks to best effect?
- Who are the good networkers that you know, both within your organisation and outside it?
- Who are the people who pass on information?
- Do you talk to them often?
- Do you seek information from them?
- What can you actively do to find out who passes on information?
- What do you do to find out what the information networks are?
- How you could improve your information networks ?
- What efforts do you make to talk with people outside your immediate work area?
- How might you increase your interactions with people who work on the periphery of your work area?
- What support staff in your organisation get to see work across a range of different areas?
- Have you tried talking to support staff?
- What resources do communication staff have?
- How could you work better with these people?
What do you know about people and information within your own organisation?
- Do you know the breadth of work going on in different parts of your organisation?
- What can you do to improve your own knowledge of who is doing what?
- When did you last discuss what others in your area are doing and finding out in the course of their work?
- What resources do you have that might help you to know what others are up to?
- When you have meetings or discussions, do you consider who else might have an interest even in the information that comes out of that meeting?
- Can you be a bit more systematic in your networking activities?
- How much do you know about the networks you deal with?
- When you are networking, do you consider that you may also be networking for the company rather than just for youself?
- Do you take steps to promote the work of those who work in the same organisation when appropriate?
How can you use each communication activity to maximum benefit?
- Do you know what forms of communication your different end users most often use?
- How do you know?
- How can you best use these communication forms?
- What different media do you regularly use?
- Are there some you could use more?
- Some ideas for maximising effect for effort.
Page compiled by Chrys Horn, June, 2003