Communication

Communication

Improving the communication of European research infrastructures is an essential step towards their sustainability. For this, there is a need to consolidate the very concept of “research infrastructures”, improve how different stakeholders perceive them and increase their visibility.

The common use of this toolkit by the different research infrastructures in Europe is expected to harmonize their communications – basically, to ensure that they “speak the same language” and effectively engage with different sectors.

The content on this communication subpage is taken from the RI-VIS project communication toolkit. Learn more about creating a social media strategy, setting up a website and planning activities and measuring performance here on the Toolkit, and continue reading on the RI-VIS Toolkit.

Q&A

First you need to define your branding, by specifying how you want to position your research infrastructure.

Then you need to set the basis: the goals you aim to achieve and the targets you aim to engage using social media platforms.

Once you define this, you will be prepared to choose the most appropriate social media platformshttps://toolkit.ri-vis.eu/targets-and-platforms"> for your research infrastructure.

Social media strategy

Identify the social media platforms that are most appropriate to reach your different target audiences and achieve your defined goals, considering:

  1. Who are the users of each platform, and what do they use this platform for?
  2. How many people use specific social media platforms (penetration rate) in each country/region you want to reach?
  3. What is your own capacity to allocate to social media (resources, contents, etc)?
Social media strategy

A good rule-of-thumb when designing your website is to envisage that it will be visited by your different types of target audiences (e.g.: researchers, industry, policy-makers, etc), but also by website visitors at different stages of interaction with your research infrastructure.

Website

Your social media strategy should be perfectly aligned with (and integrated into) the overall communication strategy of your research infrastructure. This 7-phase model will help you develop your social media strategy and challenge you to elevate the quality and balance of your posts.

Social media strategy

Social media metrics can provide useful information that enables you to measure how effective your social media strategy is: what works, what doesn’t.

There are plenty of tools and guidelines available online that you can easily adapt to measure the effectiveness of your social media. It mostly depends on how much effort you can put into this task.

Website

Contacts

Rita Costa Abecasis
Communications Manager, CCMAR Science Communication Unit
arabecasis (at) ualg.pt
John Dolan
Communications Officer, INSTRUCT ERIC
john (at) instruct-eric.org