Why do we need to communicate science?
Effective communication of scientific projects is essential for numerous reasons. In the world of research and discovery, where knowledge drives progress, the ability to convey our scientific endeavors to both specialized peers and the broader public is primordial. This communication serves as the bridge between the often complex and technical aspects of scientific work and its real-world impact, making it accessible, relevant, and meaningful to a wider audience. Whether it's sharing breakthrough findings, fostering public understanding and support,seeking collaboration, or securing funding, the act of communicating our scientific projects plays a pivotal role in advancing human understanding, addressing pressing global challenges, and ensuring the continued growth of scientific knowledge. In this age of information, effective science communication is not merely a choice but a responsibility that empowers researchers to connect, inspire, and effect change on a global scale.
Ways of communication
Communication plays a vital role in the dissemination of scientific projects, and there are various channels and approaches to effectively reach different audiences. We focused in 4 main channels: social media, radio, conferences and person-to-person interaction.
1. Social Media
Social media platforms offer an excellent means to engage with diverse audiences:
Instagram and Tiktok
Create visually appealing posts that highlight the human side of our project, such as behind-the-scenes photos, lab tours, or personal anecdotes. It can also be used to share breakthrough findings or create educational posts. These platforms are great for reaching a more general audience and making science relatable.
Share detailed articles or updates about our project's progress, targeting a professional audience interested in your field.
2. Radio
Radio broadcasts can help you reach a wider audience, including those who prefer audio content:
Radio interviews
Participate in radio interviews or guest appearances on science-oriented shows. These can help us convey the importance of our work to a broader demographic.
3. Conferences
Scientific conferences are essential for sharing research with peers:
Oral Presentations
Deliver well-structured and engaging presentations that highlight our project's objectives, methods, and results. Engage with the audience through Q&A sessions to foster discussion and collaboration.
Poster Presentations
Create visually appealing posters summarizing our project. These can be effective in one-on-one interactions and provide opportunities for networking.
Workshops and Panels
Organize or participate in workshops and panel discussions related to our field. These events facilitate in-depth discussions and knowledge sharing.
4. Person-to-Person Communication
In-person interactions remain invaluable for building meaningful connections:
Networking
Attend scientific meetups, seminars, and workshops to connect with colleagues and potential collaborators. Engage in casual conversations to foster relationships.
Public Outreach
Engage with the public through science festivals, school visits, and community events. Simplify complex concepts and make our project relatable to non-experts.
Collaboration Meetings
Organize meetings with fellow researchers, both within and outside your field, to explore potential collaborations and interdisciplinary opportunities.
Effectively communicating your scientific project through a combination of these channels ensures that your work reaches a diverse and engaged audience, from fellow researchers to the general public. Tailoring your communication approach to the specific platform and audience will maximize the impact of your scientific endeavors.
Visual Strategies for Impactful Outreach
Creating visually appealing and engaging posts for communicating your scientific project is a strategic approach to capture and maintain your audience's attention. So we adapted all our posts and presentations following this well-developed plan:
1. Visual content with symbols and graphs
Infographics
Transform complex data and findings into easy-to-understand infographics. By using visually striking graphics and charts to illustrate key points and ensure that they are concise, informative, and visually appealing we are facilitating the understanding of complex ideas to a general public.
Before-and-After Visuals
Showcase the impact of our scientific project by presenting before-and-after visuals or timelines.
Color Consistency
We developed a consistent color palette that reflects our project's identity and values. We used these colors in our posts, graphs, and visual elements to create a recognizable and cohesive brand image.
Logo Integration
If applicable, we incorporated our project's logo and emblem into our visual content. This adds a distinctive and memorable element to our media. Our logo was carefully designed trying to blend a Chlamydomonas reinhartii, the model organism of our project, and synthetic biology by reshaping a DNA chain as a Chlamydomonas.
Color Psichology
For our project we chose colors that convey the message and
emotions we wanted to evoke. The main colors we used are:
- green, the colour of microalgae, but also signifies growth and sustainability
- and blue, the colour of water, but also may represent trust and
professionalism.
So a combination of both colors matched perfectly our message.
3. Funny and Interactive Content
When creating our content, we did not only focus on the design. We wanted to make our content more engaging and humanizing it, so it could approach more to people. For doing this, we followed three points:
Humor
Injecting it into our posts when appropriate by telling funny anecdotes, memes, or lighthearted humor made our content more relatable and shareable. Of course ensuring it aligned with our project's tone and objectives.
Interactive Elements
We created interactive content like quizzes, polls, or interactive data visualizations. Encouraging our audience to actively engage with our content, increasing their investment in our project.
Stories and Anecdotes
Sharing personal stories or interesting anecdotes related to our research journey. Humanizing our project by showcasing the people behind it fostered a stronger connection with our audience.
4. Adapting content for success
Although we had different ideas of content to post, we had to asses which was our main public.
In Instagram, our most explored social media, almost half of our followers are ranged 18-24 years old, meaning that most of our followers are students. This brought us to perform type of content more affordable for students and young people including more education but also in a visual and funny way to engage this type of public.
Social Media
In order to develop our social media strategy, we focused on 3 main social media platforms: Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. Since they are different, both in content style and public, we adapted our posts accordingly.
1. Instagram
The public we have on Instagram in seeking for both an informative and interactive approach. The ages that engage with our account go from 15 to +50 years old. Therefore we designed posts that could appeal evenly to all the age groups.
Informative Posts
We wanted to get our audience informed about
our advances in the project, on a scientific and on
personal level.
First, we posted three pictures with the chosen
collor palette and aesthetic, presenting this new
era the University of Barcelona’s iGEM team was
about to enter.
Then, once all the members of the 2023 iGEM
team were chosen, we introduced othem to our
public. We published a picture for each of them
following a short introduction that included what
the team member studies, their fields of interest,
hobbies and fun facts.
We also posted about our Crowfunding campaign, the International iGEM Meet-Up we organized on the 1st and 2nd July in Barcelona and about our time at the lab.
Finally, we posted stories weekly communicating our advancements with the project and showing how our daily lives as iGEM participants looked like: including content at the lab, making-off of certain videos we have recorded.
Divulgation Posts
We developed our own divulgative series of posts
“Discover AlgaGenix”.
In each of them, we explained a specific topic that had
some relation with our project. All the posts presented the
information in a simple, appealing and aesthetic way.
We treated the following topics: water, nitrate
contamination, water treatment, microalgae and cytokinins.
Besides divulging, we tried to interact with our audience. To do so, we posted several short questions on our stories on the day before publishing the corresponding post on our feed. Our goal was trying to engage with our audience in a way they would be expecting the post the next day: both to learn new things and to check if their go the questions right.
In addition, it has to be highlighted how our posts created the final image of a bioreactor when combined together in our Instagram feed. As the final application of our project is the design of a bioreactor, we wanted to capture that in this series of posts. It is an analogy of how all the basic information we were providing could help them also to create an idea of our project. All the colors used correspond to our color palette and every post followed the same aesthetic and format.
Entertaining Posts
We could include both stories and videos we have posted on Instagram and during the past
months. As they were also posted on TikTok, they are commented in the corresponding
section.
Furthermore, we also tried to post fun and original stories during our time working at the lab.
Our goal was to show how our daily work could be entertaining and not only educative.
2. TikTok
We faced a major challenge in this social platform. Due to some external issues, we had to
reopen the account on summer, loosing all our followers along the way.
Nevertheless, we posted several videos (both informative and entertaining) using different
trending songs so a wider audience could be reached.
Our videos had an average of 500 views on TikTok. We also reposted them on our Instagram, were we got an average of more than 2000 views for the most of them.
3. LinkedIn
In order to follow the standard of this platform, we only posted informative and formal
posts.
We got to introduce the members of our team and PIs, present the project we were working
on and the problems we are trying to solve, announce our crowdfunding campaign…
We also interacted with other accounts that posted information about Congresses we
were participating in and reposted other informative posts that related with AlgaGenix.
LinkedIn turned up to be a useful tool, both for communicating and for making contacts with other professionals that could help us along our way and the development of our project.
Radio
We wanted to reach the affected communities, so we
decided to ask for a radio interview in one of the most
affected areas in Catalonia, in Lleida.
The province of Lleida is probably the region with more
agriculture and farming, so it was the perfect area to
spread our project through the community. We got an
interview in Radio Sió and it was broadcasted in two
different radio programs: the general news of Radio Sió
and one program called “Aquí a l’oest”. This allowed us
to ensure our message would reach as many people as we could.
However, when preparing the interview we had to really remember how the public we were reaching was very diverse, and we needed to appeal to both people without any scientific background. So we simplified the contents of our project significantly to have a wider outreach to the population, and offered them access to our social media so they could become more acquainted with the problem we are facing and how we intend to solve it, by, for example, reading our educational posts.
Conferences
We wanted to approach our project to the scientific community, and we tought that attending to congresses and doing conferences would be a great opportunity
ߦ We started the promotion of our project doing a flash-talk in La Pedrera in the framework of the Fellowtalks organized by La Pedrera Science Academy. There we could present our project to students from the scientific world.
ߦ During the same conference, we had the opportunity to moderate a round table with experts about the climate crisis and our natural resources
ߦ We also attended the ATG Synbio Spain congress where we had the opportunity to meet experts on the synbio world, iGEM professionals and also other iGEM teams in the frameshift of our International Meetup.
ߦ We organised a conference in Artesa de Segre, a village near Lleida, where agriculture and farming are the main economic activities. There we invited experts like agronomical engineers and also farmers and agricultors affected by the water crisis and nitrates contamination. It was a worth activity where we could explain our project to this community and learn about them in order to adapt our project better to the affected communities.
ߦ Finally, from the 22nd to 24th September we attended the Trieste Next Festival of Scientific Research. We attended the International Academy where students from all over Europe joined to different talks and round tables. As Barcelona-UB iGEM team we had the opportunity not only to attend, but to present our project in a panel with a poster presentation. So we could present our project to a community of international students and get their feedback.
Person-to-person
As well as we explained some topics that we thought could be interesting for public, we also did interviews.
As a way of making it visible, we designed a simple, but curious infographic so everybody could understand what we were trying to achieve, its benefits and the challenges it represents for us.
This represented a valuable constructive criticism to our project as it gave us the point of view we needed to include much more: the general population.
Fortunately, their feedback was enthusiastic, and it reflected the real interest thay has for our project ans science in general. Our efforts to reach their curiosity to help us divulge our project.Collaborations
Our team also wanted to step on the iGEM arena and make relations with other teams. For
that we have been setting some relations with different teams by collaborating with them
in a wide variety of activities such as participating in the world health day, sending photos of
plants or creating a music playlist to listen in the lab amongst others.
We also wanted to organize an activity that other teams could join, so we organized a photo
contest in wich each team could send a photo related with their project, team, lab…
International Meetup - Barcelona
But our greatest activity was the organization of the
International iGEM meetup in Barcelona during the 1st and
2nd of July. We collaborated with ATG Synbio Spain on
behalf of their II International Congress in Synthetic Biology
in Barcelona’s Biomedical Research Park.
We invited teams from all over the world to participate
remotely, and also other Spanish to come to Barcelona and
let each other know.
We organized a mini Jamboree where the teams exposed
their project ideas in a flash talk, and we invited a group of
judges from the iGEM organization:
- Dorothy Zhang
- Alya Masoud
- Camila Gaspar
- José Garza-Martínez
- Joana L. Rodrigues
For the winners the prize was a bioinformatics
course from one of our sponsors of the meetup,
Bversity, the 1st Virtual College for Biotech.
The teams that participated were:
- iGEM UB
- Ionis France
- DTU Denmark
- UPN Navarra 2022
- UPN Navarra 2023
- Coral Cure (Madrid)
- Biogalaxy (High School Navarra)
Crowdfunding
Achieving optimal laboratory results, executing a comprehensive plan of activities and participating in the iGEM Jamboree needs adequate funding. Throughout the summer, our team diligently pursued sponsorships and established valuable contacts to secure financial support with the University of Barcelona, CRAG and BonÀrea. Although we are very thankful to these three sponsors, more funding was needed in order to cover all the expenses. Each experiment demanded specific reagents, intricate methodologies, and specialized equipment, which were crucial for their successful execution. Also the flight tickets and the stay in Paris for the week, and the merchandising we needed to go to the Jamboree supposed an added cost
To address these financial requirements, we meticulously compiled a list of necessary items and conducted a rough estimate of the funding needed. Eventually, we devised a solution by drawing inspiration from a previous team's success. We initiated a crowdfunding platform with GoFundMe. This platform features a comprehensive project description outlining our objectives and research endeavors. Our primary aim was to secure the necessary funding for seamless laboratory operations and to facilitate the successful completion of our educational initiatives.