What should be priorities to make our work better known at your individual level, in your team and for ILRI?

During the Public Awareness Komms Klinics session on 12 July, we had an interactive conversation with participants in Addis and in Nairobi about: What should be priorities (for you, for your team and for ILRI) to make our work more popular, better known by the public?

These are the results...

At ILRI level

Training, social media policies, more demonstrations and active engagement with our audiences Stories:

• Documentation in the media
• Tangible results / more impact on research findings - people will spread the word
• How to translate reports/results in powerful stories
• Packaging our products in a manner that target audiences can understand e.g. EADD project
• Media releases more regularly
• Documentaries in the media
• More focus on traditional media

Seminars and other face-to-face engagement activities:

• Seminars: make them engaging, interesting for laymen
• ILRI field days: seeing is believing - even though reports are pretty, getting hands dirty, open days and mingling with target groups will be faster
• Engage people more e.g. open day, posters at roundabout, flyer etc.
• Demonstration (stations): show by example - have demonstration stations, something that people can visit as a reference point

Special initiatives:

• Have a short powerful introduction about ILRI to use when presenting outside ILRI
• Need to 'associate' ILRI image with what it does e.g. put an explanation of what ILRI does instead of music on the phone when people are on hold
• Consider working with sign language (how to engage deaf people)?
• Have an assigned day for communication update e.g. what's happening next week (organized by the Directorate)
• Create access and visibility of our available work
• Have a globally available database that is similar to FAOs

Guidance and training:

• Involving the communication team from the beginning in what the departments are doing
• Know about the paths to follow (especially launch of a report, ILRI publication etc.)
• How do we strengthen the links with the PA team?
• Regular training on communication (tools)
• Social media (training, update, more encouragement to use)
• Develop a social media policy / guidelines for staff to direct the communication of ILRI work on personal social media accounts

At the level of your team

Sharing stories, working out loud on the web and beyond

• Encourage sharing stories by scientists and research assistants with team to better capture ongoing project activities
• Encourage team to write stories about team activities
• More brochures and posters, especially for workshops
• Upload more info on websites
• Learn to 'work out loud' (with Evelyn)
• Reader survey for blogs (e.g. for livestock markets digest) to be able to better meet information needs of subscribers/readers

At personal level

Getting trained, mastering tools, sharing stories

• Discussing findings with target groups (e.g. farmers)
• More stories re: team activities (more stories on what my team does)
• Training (how best to tell my story)
• Understand the tools and how to use them effectively
• Better collaboration on communication within the region
• Communicating tangible achievements of our projects

What is public awareness?

(Earlier on, in the session, we asked participants to share their opinion as to what public awareness is. Hereby some results):

• Create awareness of communities
• It's the way we make people or donors part of the institution to be able to understand what ILRI is about
• Inform people, share knowledge with people outside ILRI
• Public, who is it? Within ILRI - this is related to sharing
• Passing information actively through campaigns etc.
• Public awareness - knowledge sharing --> Share what you know and get what you don't know
• Pass information on what you're doing