Want to make an impact? Change the world for the better? Be part of the solution? Chances are you do – that’s why you’re a researcher. You’re analysing and exploring to find kernels of truth that can solve problems for a community, a discipline – or the whole planet. Your work matters. Impact is necessary.
But how do you make that impact happen? A crucial part of it is delivering your research into the heads, hearts and hands of people who can use it for good – people with the power to turn it into action and policy. Your discoveries have to make the leap from your head to theirs. This is important enough to have its very own official name: Knowledge Exchange (or KE to friends).
Some powerful muscle has been working on KE. At the beginning of April the National Centre for Universities and Business announced that Research England has released the first iteration of a Knowledge Exchange Framework for universities. This is huge – a major step forward in bumping up collaboration between universities, businesses, policy-makers and the lay public. And collaboration is when the good stuff happens! Into the future, universities will be officially ranked on their KE activities – metrics like public and community engagement, partnering with big businesses and small local firms, local growth and regeneration, and more. You can read all about it here.
It’s all good, meaningful stuff. But what makes it work? At the core of all successful KE activities is a common language that delivers clear, engaging, action-focused communication. At Nifty Fox Creative we believe that the common language is visuals. Time and again we’ve watched how visual communication supercharges people’s mutual understanding of an issue or a debate. It’s the secret sauce that makes knowledge accessible. (For an example of our KE work see here.)
So what are the 6 key steps to successful KE? What can you do to exchange your knowledge in ways that count?
1. Start with why your research matters - what’s the big problem you are trying to solve? How does it relate to your audience? What change in them do you want to see: is it awareness, ability, actions or beliefs? Why should your audience trust your authority? This is a great time to ask, ‘what does success look like?’ so you can evaluate from the beginning.
Here’s an infographic we did for Emerald Publishing – take a look to see how to start with your communications strategy above all else.
2. Define your audience. These are the folks you need to reach. Who are they? Where do they get their information from? How can you access them?
3. Engage stakeholders – after defining your audience, pinpoint key influencers in that community. Reach out to them – they can help you with the next step: shaping and honing your message into the right form for the message to land.
4. Collaborative message shaping – define the key messages around your result and communicate them in a way that makes sense to your audience. Use co-production methods and collaborative working with your desired audience to get this right (see step 3). Be brief, be clear and use plain language. It can be super-helpful to think about the way you want to structure your storytelling: a dynamic Problem-Solution-Result structure? Or something more complex? (You can see explanations of different structures in our Infotopia article here.) Make sure your message builds to a call to action – what should they do next? Don’t forget your contact information – they need to know how to reach you!
5. Deliver the knowledge. The good news is there are loads of ways to do this – find the ones that work for your target community. Examples: get people together (virtually or in person); present your findings visually (one pagers, powerpoints, animations, live scribing, website etc); use social media! The crucial thing is to go where the people are and present information where they are most likely to hear your message. Need some handy resources to help you figure all this out? We got you. Check out our social media for research communications article, how to make a one page research website, all that you need to showcase your work in a virtual research shop window, and of course the Infotopia article we mentioned earlier.
6. Evaluate: remember your why in Step 1? You asked yourself what success looked like. Now you want to track metrics relating to your overall goal. Use both quantitative and qualitative methods - engage your stakeholders and get feedback that matters. One crackerjack software for this is Typeform which captures qualitative and quantitative feedback virtually.
Need inspiration? Take a look below at some of the impact-producing KE examples we’ve done, or find more on our website here. Chances are, one of these stories will light that bulb for you.
Older People’s Experiences of Funding Social Care
Understanding LGBT+ Networks in the NHS
Sheffield City Council COVID-19 Response Website
International Parliament Engagement Network Toolkit