1. What are people engaging with?

A good starting point is to return to basics and to ask:

• What is interesting about my research?

• Where can it make a difference?

• What are the overarching aims of my activity? What do I want to stimulate through interacting with people outside the academy?

• What do I want to get through the process of engagement? For example, is the public contributing to, or co-creating the research in some way, for example by adding to an archive of oral history?

2. Who are the audience?

Although we use the phrase ‘public engagement’, the word ‘public’ is rather imprecise. Just as people are all different, not all publics are the same. There is a wide variety of different interest groups, stakeholders and visitor types. Thus although there is an implicit assumption that publicly funded research has universal public value in which all members of society have a shared interest, and many researchers desire to be inclusive in order to reach as wide an audience as possible, in practical terms it can be much more strategic and effective to segment potential audiences.

Segmentation is a well-established notion within marketing, the arts, culture, and heritage sectors. It is the process of dividing and organising the population into meaningful and manageable groups in order to tailor activities and communications to their preferences and interests. It can also be used as a tool to diversify and widen audiences by identifying under-represented groups. Defining your audience means that you can tailor communication to them rather than using a scatter-gun approach that hopes, or assumes, that people will be interested in your work.

There are many different ways of segmenting an audience. The Audience Agency works internationally and has some good advice on audience segmentation that is particularly relevant to projects that are partnering with arts and heritage organisations. It also offers sophisticated analysis tools that are aimed primarily at these sectors. These are likely to be more detailed than is required by most HERA projects but the principle of audience segmentation is worth considering. The Audience Agency suggests that the following variables may be useful in segmenting audiences:

Modified from The Audience Agency

Instead of aiming activities at ‘the general public’, consider whether your audience might be, for example, families, school children or young adults. Is it local residents of a particular area? Professionals in a particular sector? You might also consider targeting audiences that are socially marginalised or frequently excluded from academic contexts in order to widen participation.

It can be useful to have a scoping stage where you have some preliminary conversations with your target group(s) in order to understand your audience. This might include verifying why your topic is of interest to them and / or discussing what might be the best methods of engagement to get them interested in your research. Knowing your audience means that you can plan around them in order to best achieve your aims. This, in turn, means that your public engagement is likely to be much more successful and impactful.

You can refine or expand beyond your original proposal to HERA as long as this is justified in your annual report.

3. What Method of Engagement Is Most Suitable?

Choosing a method of engagement is a matter of selecting the most appropriate tool depending on the audience and purpose of engagement. Staff time, cost, duration and scale of engagement (how many people and geographical scale) are also important factors in selection. The Engage2020 project and National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement have useful resources that help researchers select an appropriate method based on purpose and audience.

The range of public engagement activities used by previous HERA projects includes: participatory art, art installations, exhibitions, films, concerts, festivals, pop-up stands at various events, fashion shows, community projects, co-created research, life-long learning activities, education packs for schools, interactive websites, bespoke apps, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs etc), podcasts, public talks, posters, newspaper and magazine articles, press releases, TV and radio programmes and other kinds of media appearances.

Many of the most successful projects have used these in combination, drawing on a spectrum of activities that vary in the intensity of their interactivity. Successful projects also frequently involve partnership working and have drawn on the expertise of non-academic partners in order to inspire, generate and tailor content, provide essential technical or linguistic insights, offer exciting venues, and reach target audiences.

For example, several HERA projects have museum, library or archive partners. Staff in such institutions are often strongly embedded in their community, have an excellent understanding of potential audiences and possess an established network and infrastructure for reaching out beyond the academy. Many also have specialist pedagogues or outreach officers who are experienced in working with children and community groups. They are experts in working outside the academy who and can help you to design and implement effective activities, and often welcome new content to add to existing programmes. Developing full and rounded partnerships that link research, collections and public engagement can be extremely successful and satisfying.

The transnational nature of HERA projects offers a unique range of options – and distinct challenges – in terms of the scale of public engagement, from the very local to the pan-European. At the small scale, projects have engaged with local communities, for instance to explore locally relevant issues such as the ways that people feel about place and identity. At the national scale they have sought to engage policy makers or governments to highlight awareness and create dialogue and change in health or environmental policy. Despite the advantages of transnational research, with some notable exceptions it has, however, often proved more challenging for HERA projects to develop effective public engagement on a large, multi-country, European or global scale. While there may sometimes be barriers in terms of cultural context, where appropriate, HERA welcomes attempts to develop forms of public engagement that capitalise on the benefits of transnational team working and that embrace audiences beyond national boundaries. The digital humanities and social media platforms have a particular role to play in this regard.

The multi-lingual nature of HERA projects means that language often presents a particular challenge for HERA projects. The translation of words and concepts into local languages can sometimes be difficult. Some projects have addressed this issue as a group and have developed their own dictionary or thesaurus for research and public engagement purposes. Others have taken the decision to create forms of public engagement that sidestep language as much as possible by relying on music or visual media. The appropriate use of language in relation to the target audience also needs to be carefully considered in order to ensure clear, jargon-free communication.

HERA is keen to encourage creativity, innovation, imagination and ambition in public engagement. Some of the most successful public engagement activities carried out by HERA projects have been experimental in nature. It may be useful to try out activities on a small scale to assess audience reaction and refine before scaling up to a larger (and more expensive) ‘big splash’ activity.

Radio.Garden: A Case Study in Transnational Public Engagement

Radio.garden is an output of the HERA project Transnational Radio Encounters: Mediations of Nationality, Identity and Community through Radio (TRE). The project took place from 2013-2016 as part of the HERA Cultural Encounters strand. It examined how radio as a medium fosters transnational encounters, and how it is shaped in and by transnational arenas.

Radio.garden is an online platform that allows users to explore an interactive globe filled with radio. It allows listeners to explore processes of broadcasting and to hear identities across the entire globe. It connects distant cultures, reconnects people with ‘home’ from thousands of miles away, and includes community radio stations which traditionally enrich the places in which people live.

Prof Alec Badenoch, PI University of Utrecht, Netherlands and Endowed Professor of Transnational Media (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) with award Winner, 2017 Best Use of Archive FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievement Awards

As a project engaged with research on radio, TRE clearly identified their audience as the global radio listener community. The aim of the activity was to engage the public with the connective potential of radio by creating the conditions for people to have their own transnational radio encounters. The project partner Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision commissioned professional design companies Studio Puckey and Moniker in Amsterdam to develop the platform. Having tested the platform and given it a soft launch, the project was confident in the technical and public engagement potential of the activity. They were then able to further build public engagement through a series of media appearances, including via national radio (BBC Radio 4). Importantly, these media appearances catalysed public engagement with the platform rather than standing as forms of public engagement on their own and allowed radio.garden to further grow its audience. Social media also played an important role in letting people know about radio.garden and in gaining feedback from users through analysis of tweets. The latter now offer further exciting opportunities for researchers to understand the roles of radio through the new digital archive created by the activity.

Since its launch in 2016 radio.garden has had over 900 million page views. In the first six months alone it had 100 million visitors. It is one of the most successful humanities public engagement activities ever carried out. Since the TRE project ended, the platform developer Jonathan Puckey has continued to run radio.garden, adding over 15,000 new stations to the ‘Live’ layer and adding a ‘favourites’ function to the platform. He has also made some changes to respond to the lower take up of the specialist archive layers and to increase capacity to accommodate the growing number of new stations. He has also created a phone app. The removal of the non-live layers highlights the need for projects to consider IP issues when working with external partners.

Dr Caroline Mitchell, Associate Professor in Radio and Participation, University of Sunderland UK describes how radio.garden came about and reaction to it:

In February 2016 we were entering the last stages of the project. Like most academics, members of our HERA project (Prof. Golo Föllmer Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany; myself from University of Sunderland and Professor Peter Lewis from London Metropolitan University, UK; Assistant Prof. Dr. Jacob Kreutzfeldt at University of Copenhagen and Associate Prof. Per Jauert Aarhus University in Denmark and Professor Dr. Sonja de Leeuw and Prof. Dr. Alec Badenoch from University of Utrecht in the Netherlands) all knew the value of telling the story of our research beyond refereed articles and published reports and books. Our varied interests in the radio medium meant that from an early stage we were excited about what our ‘exhibition’ would look, and importantly sound, like.

Peter Lewis and I had been conducting workshops in Britain, Canada, France and Spain, gathering stories of transnational radio participation by community radio broadcasters in collaboration with a wide range of social, ethnic and special interest groups, listening to what ‘transnational community radio’ sounds like and looking at the conditions that support transnational radio production, broadcasts and archives. People’s links with homeland and diaspora transcend the boundaries of national identity. In ethnic minority radio stations there were programmes made by and for long-standing minority ethnic groups, and increasingly it has become the role of community radio to give voice to more recently arrived communities. We had mused over how to display these connections, their histories and the huge range of community stations that existed worldwide. One of our community researchers had constructed a ‘listening table’ where people could hear interviews about radio’s transnational connections and this included lit up pathways connecting countries and stations. Peter and I had used geo-located digital mapping in previous projects (see for instance http://www.comapp-online.de and https://connected-communities.org/index.php/project_resources/map-your-bristol/).

School students explore radio garden as part of BBC Young Reporters and STEM Ambassador workshop, BBC Bristol 2018 (Photo Marvin McKenzie)

Together with our colleagues and our partner, the Netherland’s National Sound and Vision Institute in Hilversum, the project commissioned an online interactive platform from Amsterdam based designers Studio Moniker that would highlight key aspects of transnational radio experiences. Jonathan Puckey carried out the project with Studio Puckey, creating an innovative listening platform: a beautifully designed interactive globe without national borders that draws in listeners to surf the global airwaves.

After pre-testing and a ‘soft’ launch at the project’s final conference in Utrecht Radio.Garden went live on 13 December 2016.

The Live section allows you to explore a world of radio as it is happening right now. Tune into any place on the globe to explore over 15,000 stations (stations are still added every week) broadcasting live to your desktop or mobile phone. What sounds familiar? What sounds foreign? Where would you like to travel and what sounds like ‘home’? Jingles offered a world-wide crash course in station identification. How do stations signal within a fraction of a second what kind of programmes you are likely to hear? History offered clips from radio history, while in the Stories section listeners told how they used radio to make themselves at home in the world and described their radio journeys as they crossed borders and countries

Following its formal launch, the site received approximately half a million visitors in its first day and by the end of January over 18 million visitors. To date it has had more than 900 million page views. It has won major awards, including a ‘Webby’ for designer and site developer Jonathan Puckey and has been picked up by newspapers, journalists, news websites, social media platforms and broadcasters all over the world. The site developer has taken on extra staff to keep up with adding stations.

Since the launch I’ve been monitoring the thousands of tweets at #radio.garden that still come in on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis from every continent of the world. This is where it gets exciting in terms of the impact of the research. The tweets have been entirely and overwhelmingly enthusiastic; in many ways defining the impact of the research. They herald Radio Garden as new way of listening to radio, exploring music, languages and radio programmes.

“Radio meets Google Earth”; “I swear this is the most entertaining thing I’ve ever come across”;

“This is an amazing site that will change the way you listen to the world!”

“My first reaction to radio.garden was excitement ‐ it is so accessible ‐ radio at my fingertips”

The coolest link ever, radio from all over the world …Fantastic to use with our children from all over the world! Have a look together with your class! #ell #esl #eal #ellchat #langchat #exploreinyourclassroom

The best website ever to practise your language! Also, you can listen to the world radio at the same time. Follow the green dot to identify your selected location and tune in. You can learn a lot from listening to the radio…

Meet John, my 85 yrs young neighbour who has @ParkinsonsUK. He can now use http://radio.garden on his #iPad to find #radio stations in #Greece to listen to in his home language.#digitalskills helps John with developing his #motorskills @getonlineweek #inspiration #try1thing

In the two years since Radio Garden’s launch, Peter Lewis and I have carried out small scale impact workshops with a range of people and organisations to introduce them to the platform. This has included working with senior citizens in community settings, BME and refugee organisations and youth projects. In one workshop with school children in conjunction with the BBC we witnessed the expression on the face of one teenage ‘radio gardener’: we saw the thrill and wonder of being able to connect to her family’s homeland via a station from her grandmother’s home town in Cyprus where she heard her family’s language and music. In another encounter there were tears as an older women found the station in Italy that her son, who emigrated there, listens to – she said “we can listen at the same time!” This same person declared that she would set up ‘radio garden parties’ with her friends and neighbours so they could all make similar connections with family and friends through their beloved radios. These workshops have been largely unfunded although we hope this will change soon…

It is clear that as well as the viral spread of Radio Garden through social media, word of mouth within interest groups and family and friendship networks has also been powerful. With a touch of the screen Radio Garden offers an escape from the bubble of ‘likes’ to new musical and linguistic encounters, geographical difference and distance, perhaps even an escape from the bubble of nationality. Might this audio globe be as influential as the ‘Earthrise’ photograph taken from Apollo 8 in 1968?

For open access to the TRE project publication ‘Transnationalizing Radio Research click here

4. How Can I Let People Know About My Activity?

There is little point in organising a public engagement event if no one shows up! Likewise, many websites or social media initiatives flounder because nobody knows about them or wants to contribute. Projects often put a great deal of time and effort into organising public engagement activities but they don’t have the impact that they deserve because they don’t let people know about them. It’s very easy for your activity to get lost in the white noise of constant communication that people live in today.

In order for projects and audiences to derive maximum benefit from public engagement it may be useful to consider the following:

• Identifying your target audience is vital to making sure that you are communicating effectively about your plans.

• Leverage local partners and resources. They will know how best to reach your intended audience and can be very helpful in providing effective channels to do so.

• Use a range of media and build between activities to advertise your activity. For example, a press release or media appearance can be used to promote public engagement, as the Transnational Radio Encounters project did for their Radio Garden app in the case study above.

• If you are planning to use media appearances as a way of engaging the public then training in how best to get your message across and appear on camera can be very useful. This can often be organised through your institution.

• Participate in large-scale events such as festivals where there is a guaranteed audience who may be interested in your work. This has the benefit of piggy-backing on established organisation and marketing, thereby lowering burden on project staff.

• Invest in good graphics and professional design. Not only do they make a project look smart but they help to attract people.

• Digital platforms and social media are very cost effective ways of reaching audiences and involving people beyond the local in order to both publicise and scale-up an activity. The ELMCIP project used social media to generate momentum for the creation of digital literature archives through contributions from user communities beyond the academy. The collection of digital literature was vital to the research and developed a critical mass such that the archive is now well known and continues to be sustained after the project end. Other HERA projects have put images or tours or their physical exhibitions on-line or have held exhibitions entirely online.

• HERA is always happy to post activities on its website and to use its social media channels to help advertise project events. The HERA twitter handle is @HERA_Research and the hashtag is: #humanitiesmatter

5. Evaluation

Evaluation of your activity is vital to understanding what difference public engagement has made and thus what effects (impact) you have had on your audience. Evaluation is not a description of your event but is an evidence-based analysis of its consequences (positive and negative). It involves a process of data collection and reflection that helps you to learn from your experience, and to assess its benefit and impact. Demonstrating the effects of your activities is important in terms of public accountability for funding and evidencing the value for money of humanities research. You will be expected to demonstrate the impact of your activities in project reports to HERA.

There are many qualitative and quantitative methods available for the collection of evaluation data and a range of resources available to help with this. In evaluating your activity you will need to consider reach (how many people participated; geographical scope in terms of locations from where you drew in participation) and depth (the extent to which your activity created impact). The nature of your activity, what you wish to find out about it, time available for the collection of data, expertise available for its analysis and ethical issues will also affect your choice. Some HERA projects have used short on-the-spot questionnaires to obtain audience feedback at an event. This can be done on paper or using free off-the-shelf smartphone or tablet apps. The latter are user-friendly and have the advantage of speeding up analysis as data do not need to be entered manually and such apps often have inbuilt analytics software. Interviews and various forms of social media analysis can also be useful. Quotes from participants can be particularly helpful in evidencing impact and reflecting upon your activity. Other potential forms of data collection techniques include focus groups, postcards, games or video diaries.

Evaluation questions are effectively research questions and should link to what you want to find out about your activity. For example, you might want to find out:

• What have participants learnt or understood?

• Have their attitudes changed as a result of the engagement? If so, how?

• Would they like to find out more as a result of having participated in the activity?

• Do they have feedback or knowledge that could contribute to your future research?

It can be a good idea to take photos of your activity that build into a project archive. Not only are photos are good for spreading the word about your project on social media, but they can also be included in reports to HERA as evidence of your activity.