Sharing FLEET research: communication
Communicating FLEET research and events, internally and externally
FLEET’s communications functions include:
- Internal communication to maintain a cohesive Centre
- Informing the Australian public of the benefits being gained from research funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC)
- Supporting FLEET’s outreach functions to build a more science-aware public
- Appropriately communicating FLEET’s research outputs to different audiences, from the general public to the research community and potential collaborators
- Building the transferable communications skills of FLEET members.
FLEET faced 2020’s unique challenges to internal and external communication by:
- Facilitating casual, unstructured intra-Centre discussions via the Slack online-discussion platform (also integrated with the annual workshop) and weekly ‘tearoom’ catch-ups
- Significantly increasing the number of internal Centre seminars, from four to ten
- Instigating weekly email digests to members and affiliates to summarise Centre and relevant events, including Zoom links
- Experimenting with online virtual-meeting platform iSee to allow organic discussions and poster sessions, including at the Centre’s annual workshop
- Co-hosting Trans-pacific series of condensed-matter talks to maintain links between US and Australian physics communities
- Instigating and facilitating Australian Institute of Physics–ARC Centre series of talks
- Seeking out opportunities to partner with other science organisations in delivering ‘Covid safe’ content
- Promoting FLEET write-ups via increased numbers of press releases and research blogs.
Also see the Centre’s 2020 remote-outreach achievements.
Research blog
FLEET puts significant effort into web-based blog posts, sharing research news across the Centre, along with outreach, training, equity and other news.
The fresh, regularly updated content from FLEET’s research blog provides the content feeding the Centre’s social media, providing compelling content for followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Short descriptions linking to blog posts in the Centre’s monthly newsletter also provide broad news to members, affiliates and stakeholders.
The same content, pushed out to online science platforms, supports the Centre’s online media mentions and drives researchers’ Altmetric rankings.
FLEET’s blog forms an extremely effective channel:
- Promoting members’ research
- Celebrating members’ achievements
- Highlighting Centre engagement with partners and the wider community.
FLEET news is avalable online and over 34,000 people visited in the last year.
Read our Case Study
A silver lining of Covid pandemic travel restrictions was to force quick expansion of virtual meetings and other online tools. I expect we will use some of these online tools long into the future, as they've helped us meet more frequently, with less of an environmental footprint, and potentially the ability to directly interact with a broader cross-section of the public, as well as other scientists.
Dr David Cortie,
FLEET Communications Committee Chair
FLEET succesfully uses mainstream media, university and partner communication teams, and online science platforms to communicate Centre research results widely – to the public as well as science peers. The Centre has twice voluntarily increased the ‘media mentions’ target, after exceeding the original goal by a factor of more than 10.
In 2020, with many members concentrating on writeup, the Centre put extra effort into sharing the news of this research. In total, 34 FLEET stories had full press-release distribution (compared with 13 last year), with these driving the bulk of the Centre’s 557 media mentions in 2020, and improving researchers’ visibility to potential global collaborators.
FLEET has a dedicated team for publicising research outputs online and via social media, and a broad range of communication channels available.
FLEET member survey