public engagement masterclass 28: communicating your event/file/masterclass... · masterclass title...

Public Engagement Masterclass 28: Communicating your event

Greg Oldfield, Head of Public Engagement & Impact, Research & Innovation Services

27/01/2016 © The University of Sheffield

What is Public Engagement?

• “Public engagement describes the myriad of ways in which the activity and benefits of higher education and research can be shared with the public. Engagement is by definition a two-way process, involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit”

National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement

• The University’s Good Research and Innovation Practices policy

www.sheffield.ac.uk/ris/grip

• Minimum accepted practices in public engagement

• Higher practices to aspire to


Introduction to the Public Engagement and Impact Team

• Introduction to the Public Engagement and Impact Team

• The masterclass series

• What we can do to help?



http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ris/publicengagement/ resource/toolkits/index

Faculty Support

Arts & Humanities Amy Carter

Engineering Sara Unwin

Medicine, Dentistry and Health

Nicola Strafford

Science Greg Oldfield

Social Sciences Amy Carter

Fran Marshall

Impact Cliona Boyle


Contact [email protected]

Masterclass series Masterclass title Date

21: What to think about when organising your public engagement event Tuesday 24 February 2015

22: Working in partnership with others

Wednesday 25 March 2015

23: Coordinating large scale public engagement, e.g. faculty based events, film or lecture series etc

Wednesday 29 April 2015

24: Public Engagement or Widening Participation/ Outreach? Things to

think about when organising events for children and young people

Wednesday 27 May 2015

25: Grant writing and impact Wednesday 24 June 2015

26: Writing a risk assessment for your event/ event planning Wednesday 29 July 2015

27: How to identify, approach and work with stakeholders Wednesday 30 September 2015

28: How to communicate your event

Wednesday 28 October 2015

29: Storytelling in public engagement Wednesday 25 November 2015

30: Some ideas about how to evaluate your public engagement event Wednesday 16 December 2015


Today’s session

• Some general tips on communicating your event – Greg

• Using social media – Andrew Twist

• Working with the media – Amy Pullan

• Producing printed material – Sheryl Mather


Who is here?

A. Academic staff

B. Non-academic staff

C. Post-graduate student

D. other


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Which faculty are you from?

A. Arts & Humanities B. Engineering C. Medicine Dentistry

and Health D. Science E. Social Sciences F. Cross faculty


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How much do you know about communicating a public engagement event?

A. A lot

B. Quite a lot

C. A little

D. Don’t know anything


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How much do you know about promoting a public engagement event on social media?

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B. Quite a lot

C. A little



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How much do you know about promoting a public engagement event to the media?

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B. Quite a lot

C. A little



A lot

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lot

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How much do you know about producing printed material for a public engagement event?

A. A lot

B. Quite a lot

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Where to start

The four questions to ask are: 1. Who are your audience? 2. Who else might be interested in the

project? 3. What is the key message to those

audiences? 4. What methods should we use to convey

the message to the audience?

• Develop a ‘headline’ statement or strapline to promote your message

• Tell the audience what is in it for them: learning, entertainment or fun etc

• Use a striking quote – from a speaker, a distinguished academic or someone who attended a previous event – to support your message

• Use plain English

• Make it brief


• Communicate directly with relevant organisations

• Use mailing lists you may have

• Can you promote your event with a similar one?

• Placing printed material in venues used by the target audience

• Advertising in appropriate specialist publications


Over time… • Some people will become regulars

• You can tell them about future activities and they can join the mailing list

• Interest from the press may increase


Andrew Twist


Social media and events

Best practice tips for using social media with regards to university events.


Top questions I get asked

• How do I promote my event on social media?

• Should there be a hashtag for the event?

• What tips do you have for livetweeting an event?

• What social media activity can I do after the event?

• What should I do about filming my event?


How do I promote an event on social media?



• Post about the event regularly on your social media channels

• Good posts will include

1. A brief description about the event

2. Any hashtags being used for the event

3. Link to register for tickets

4. A graphic including the key information about the event.



• Pin a post about your event to the top of your Facebook page and Twitter timeline.

• This will mean that people who land on your profile are more likely to see the event promo and your post won’t simply have been lost down your timeline.



• Consider who your audience is for the event and @-tweet to any relevant accounts that might retweet your post and help you reach this audience

• Within a university context this could include the @sheffielduni central account, faculty/department accounts, funding body accounts, NGOs etc.

• It is also worth sharing information about your event in our Social Media Forum so that other social media managers in the university can help you promote it via their channels.



• Promoting events on social media isn’t a hugely complex process.

• By posting regularly about the event and including all the salient information you can raise awareness and drive people to sign up.

• Start promoting it a couple of months in advance and ramp up the frequency of your posts in the last few days.

• Let people know if tickets are selling fast - the threat of missing out often prompts people into action.


Should you have a hashtag?


Should we have a hashtag?

• This question crops up more than pretty much any other one in relation to events - and often people don’t really consider the pros and cons, they just feel obliged to have a hashtag.

• What do you think the pros and cons of having a hashtag are?

• Spend a couple of minutes just chatting to the person next to you to come up with as many pros and cons as you can.


What the pros and cons of having event hashtags?

Pros

• Hashtags help you to monitor all the conversations taking place online

about your event.

• Hashtags can help your event to ‘trend’ on a local, national or international

scale.

• Hashtags can be used to crowdsource engagement such as questions for

speakers.

• Collecting content from hashtags via Storify can help you create content about the event for your website or

simply for your records.

Cons

• Hashtags can become a negative experience.

• Mischievous users can deliberately use your hashtag to criticise you and this

can lead to you trending for the wrong reasons.

• Hijacked hashtags can often be picked up by journalists and used as part of

negative stories.


Should you have a hashtag?

Before committing to having a hashtag for an event there are a few important questions to ask yourself:

•Is this event likely to be unpopular with our followers?

•Is this event likely to be targeted by known protest groups or campaigners?

•Do we think there are likely to be more negative tweets than positive?

•If concerned about this, get in touch with the central social media team and we can talk it through


Hashtags

When it comes to selecting a hashtag we would advise:

•Consider one hashtag to tie multiple events together – It can be beneficial to create one hashtag for a number of related events. For example, you might wish to use one consistent hashtag across your entire guest lecture series so that attendees become familiar with it and can easily recall it when tweeting about the individual events.

•Check existing activity on the hashtag – It is important to check if your desired hashtag is already being used by searching for it on Twitter.


Hashtags

When it comes to selecting a hashtag we would advise:

•Consider possible duality of meaning – Choose wording carefully and consider what other meanings could be construed.

•Avoid open-ended hashtags – Hashtags that go wrong tend to be vague and open-ended, leaving room for misappropriation. Eliminate ambiguity to avoid trolling.

•Keep length in mind – the longer your hashtag, the less room there will be for people to comment within their tweets.


Hashtags

If you do have a hashtag - make sure people know about it!

Before the event, promote it via:

• Your departmental website

• Any University news stories/press releases about the event

• Posters and other print materials about the event

• Social media posts about the event

• Emails to guests / attendees

• On tickets to the event (if possible)


Hashtags

If you do have a hashtag - make sure people know about it!

During the event, promote it via:

•Any screens or digital signage available in the room

•The opening slide of a speaker’s presentation

• An announcement by the compere / host

•Any printed posters or pop-up banners

•It can also be worthwhile to share details of any guest wi-fi networks during the event to enable people to better engage on social media.


Responding to negative contributions

• It is inevitable on social media that some people will make negative contributions to hashtags and this is fine. Don’t worry about it, it is just one of those things.

• Deciding whether or not to respond to criticism/negativity should be done on a case by case basis.

• It is worth looking at the profile of the person to see if they are a fan of ‘trolling’ or whether you think they can reasonably be engaged with in a productive conversation.

• If you decide to engage with them, acknowledge their feedback and answer any questions you can in a polite and positive manner.


What do you do if your hashtag is hijacked? Your hashtag has been hijacked when it gets to the stage where you are seeing more negative posts than positive or if your hashtag is clearly being misappropriated and targeted by people deliberately trolling you.

If a hashtag gets hijacked, the number one recommendation is STOP ENGAGING. Continuing to engage is only adding more tweets to the stream, allowing for the hashtag to grow and potentially trend, drawing more attention to the negativity.

If this hijacking presents a potential PR issue for the University, email [email protected] and [email protected] as soon as possible.

Continue to monitor the hashtag and screengrab any potentially damaging tweets.


What tips do you have for livetweeting an event?



• Twitter is a great platform for covering live events – so much so that ‘livetweeting’ has become a common feature of the platform.

• Livetweeting is not only a great way of communicating your event to people who can’t attend, but also a great tool for engaging with people who are present.



Practicalities of livetweeting:

• Livetweeting works best when done using a combination of laptop and smartphone.

• Using a laptop with proper keyboard is easier for typing quickly and capturing quotes from speakers in a timely manner.

• Using a phone as well is good for taking quick photographs to share without having to faff about connecting the phone to the laptop via cables.

• Make sure you are sat somewhere relatively close to the speaker(s) so that you can hear what is being said and report it accurately in your posts.

• Make sure you are connected to any available Wi-Fi at the event to speed up the process of uploading tweets.


Use a piece of software like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite on your laptop to best manage the livetweeting process.



With Tweetdeck/Hootsuite you can set up columns for:

•Tweets being sent from your account

•Tweets mentioning your account

•Tweets that include your event hashtag

This will help you to monitor the different content streams for your event within one screen.



When livetweeting an event you should:

• Set the scene for guests not in attendance by tweeting who the speaker is and ideally a photograph of them on stage.

• Aim to tweet only the salient / key points to avoid boring followers

• Use visuals. Tweeting relevant presentation slides, images or videos referred to by the speaker can be a great way to make your entire audience feel part of the event.

• Ask for questions from your audience

• Retweet interesting posts from attendees/users contributing to the hashtag

• Always remember to include your hashtag within your tweets

• Be interactive. Aim to start conversations with the people who are contributing to your hashtag.


What social media activity should I do after the event?


What social media activity should I do after the event?

After your event you should:

•Collate the livetweet content into a story using Storify and share a link to this from your social media channels.

•Share any video/photographic content that you have produced via your website and on social media.

•Continue to monitor the hashtag to check for any follow up questions / feedback or other pieces of engagement.

•Remove any pinned tweets/posts promoting the event that are now out of date - perhaps replace with the video or Storify post.


What should I do about filming my event?


What should I do about filming my event? Options for getting your event filmed:

• If you want to ‘livestream’ your event then get in touch with the University’s AV team and they might be able to offer support on this and also more generally on filming the event.

• If your event is academic in nature, then it might be a good fit for our iTunes U channel and the iTunes U team may be able to provide support in terms of filming.

• If you have budget then we can recommend a number of partner video agencies who can support on event filming.

• If you have no budget then you can borrow equipment from the AV team or from us in Corporate Affairs and we can offer some technical assistance in how to set it up.

To Discover And Understand.

Amy Pullan

http://prezi.com/5apquekfwqkq/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

http://prezi.com/5apquekfwqkq/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

Sheryl Mather


How to Communicate your event

Sheryl Mather, Graphic Design Manager Print and Design Solutions, CiCS

How much have you learnt in today’s session?

A. Quite a lot

B. A small amount

C. No new information

D. Don’t know


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How much have you learnt about promoting a public engagement event on social media?

A. Quite a lot

B. A small amount


D. Don’t know


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No new

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How much have you learnt about promoting your public engagement event to the media? A. Quite a lot

B. A small amount


D. Don’t know


Quite a

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A small a

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No new

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How much have you learnt about producing printed material?

A. Quite a lot

B. A small amount


D. Don’t know


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Opportunities for engagement – what is coming up?

• Robosapiens (September to December 2015)

• Off the Shelf (October 2015)

• Being Human(November 2015)

• Krebs Festival (November 2015)

• Festival of Social Science (November 2015)

• Doc/Fest (March and June 2016)

© The University of Sheffield

For further information contact:

[email protected]

@UniShefEngage

#GetEngaged


Questions


To Discover And Understand.

public engagement masterclass 28: communicating your event/file/masterclass... · masterclass title...

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