“You can produce quality online content, you can produce quality in-person content. You can’t do them both at the same time.” Dr Jamie Gallagher on the need to think creatively when it comes to producing online public engagement events.
This week’s guest on the Research Comms podcast is Dr. Jamie Gallagher, science communication and evaluation expert. He reveals how he pivoted to take his science communication business online after the COVID pandemic hit, and how he’s been helping other public engagement practitioners to navigate the transition to our new virtual world.
The below interview has been edited for brevity and clarity
How did you get into public engagement?
It was a very linear step-by-step process. As a PhD student there were lots of different courses that you could go on. I went down to my local science centre for an afternoon and had some science communication training, and I went away and I thought ‘that was quite interesting’. Then an opportunity with the BBC came up to do a weekend of training and I thought ‘I'll go along to that’ and that was really good.
Then a week-long training opportunity came up and I thought ‘well, let's go in depth, let's try it’. And I went along to Cheltenham science festival, one of the biggest science festivals in the UK, and I had an absolutely fantastic time. I thought ‘I love sharing the work that I do.’ So I did some training and then I made the decision that ‘this is what I love’.
I started finding opportunities, any opportunity to talk about my work, to share, to learn how to share and that carried on through my PhD. Then I became the Central Public Engagement Lead at the University of Glasgow. I was the first central engagement person that they had, and now for the past three years I've been freelance, so it's all just built up gradually.
And it's been a really nice journey!
Do you remember what it was about those early days of venturing into the world of public engagement that appealed to you?
It's difficult to know really, I was getting a satisfaction and an enjoyment from it, and I remember there was one real key decision moment for me.
I was approaching the end of my PhD, and I was deciding what I was going to do. My boyfriend asked me if I would get more or less satisfaction from publishing a landscape-changing paper, than I would running and organising some of the events that I do. The answer was as clear as night and day for me.
That’s not to take away from the achievement of publishing fantastic papers, that's obviously amazing. But for me that's not what was going to give me the satisfaction that I wanted, and I knew that staying in research was not for me, but working alongside researchers was.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
You used to do a lot of in-person events. How have you coped with the change in the midst of the pandemic?
It has been a total journey, as everyone has experienced this year. Things have changed radically and in March, as the situation started to become apparent, I was actually at a big event. I was in Ireland, delivering talks to thousands of school children, as we were starting to get the news of coronavirus creeping into the countries around the world.
Then when the more serious nature of it emerged is when things really changed. My calendar, which was filled up for the year, started emptying. Within one week I had seven thousand pounds of work cancelled.
So my diary was just clearing out, and I worried. I thought ‘my career, because it's based on in-person engagement, either training or delivering science content, is now over and I need to find a job quickly’.
I wanted to keep busy and I wanted to feel connected to the public engagement and the science communication community. So I set up weekly online sessions and I asked everyone to come together, and we explored a different topic.
These sessions were popular and people started asking me questions about how to organise these sessions and how to deal with this fancy Zoom stuff. Then people started asking me to come in and deliver a training session.
So I went from all of my work cancelling, my career being absolutely over, to it skyrocketing and everyone was getting in touch asking me to run sessions. Now, just the geek that I am is getting to share all the things that I have done for the past twenty years.
Are there specific things you notice that people do differently online to when they’re organising in-person engagement events?
I think we're all still learning, and I heard it summed up in quite a nice way when someone said we're using new technologies in old ways. I think that's really true, we're just replicating our in-person events in a Zoom meeting, and does that really work?
One of the things I'm getting researchers to consider is what kind of online event are they running.
Should it be a meeting? Should you be asking people to turn their cameras and microphones on? How do people feel getting put into breakout rooms with strangers? Or should it be a webinar? Should it be a conference? Should it be a Youtube stream?
So showing them the distinct differences between all the different platforms, and what they can use. Also I'm encouraging researchers not just to think about online engagement, but to think about non-in-person engagement.
There's a really beautiful project across the UK called Curiosity Box, and they makes science kits that are sent out to people's homes. Normally this is a paid monthly subscription and you get a little experiment through your door that is lovely. But in lockdown companies paired up with Curiosity Box to get kits out to homes from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, so they could continue their learning at home.
These are beautiful projects that are not about inviting everyone into a Zoom meeting. It's about working out what non-personal engagement we can do.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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