Ten Top Tips for research communications

This month’s Podium Post comes from an anonymous former RPC Director. Based on several years’ experience building up the programme’s communications work, these Ten Top Tips give any research programme something to think about.

1. Team is all. Use internal communications effectively to build morale and keep spirits up, not to gossip. Don’t let some dominate your discourse at the expense of others.

2. Just do it! There’s nothing worse than a huge, wordy communications strategy. Keep it slim, with clear activities and outputs, and do them! Don’t wait for huge doses of consensus, debate and argument – communications in a programme has to be dynamic and adaptive, and to get there requires trial and error. So don’t hesitate… communicate!

3. Keep it visual. But when you do it, make it look eye-catching. Don’t produce products that are dull and then distribute them. A sign of a good product is if your local DFID country programme samples it for a ministerial visit without informing you (or paying the producers!). Make your brand eye-catching.

4. Look around. Keep peeking at what others are doing around you and then do the same – but in your own way. For example, put together a funky CD or DVD rather than give people more and more printed papers to carry around. And far better a smart product to hand out at meetings than business cards.

5. Don’t confuse publishing with communication. There’s nothing worse than bogging down creativity with the hard graft of producing documents. So make sure you have a separate publications process (peer review, editing, etc.), that enables your ‘creatives’ to focus on their strengths while others get research delivered to schedule.

6. Be bold – and simple. Remember your audience is not always able to comprehend your purpose – so keep your headline messages bold and simple and have evidence ready and waiting to back them up. That’s the art of influencing and informing. There’s nothing worse than consultants with tin ears evaluating a programme, so make sure that you’ve got upfront messages in simple language that even they can absorb!

7. You’re supposed to build capacity. So go out there and build brilliant communications people in your partner countries and institutions – don’t produce everything at home. And don’t necessarily recruit the most advanced; take on those at earlier stages who will stay, learn, and remain loyal!

8. Maintain internal learning. Your communications efforts should both bring in knowledge from outside the programme and help synthesise this knowledge, as well as produce new knowledge internally and then disseminate it. This includes better inward communications from DFID staff, other research programmes, and related initiatives. R4D is great

9. If in doubt, shout! You may find that your donor is sending conflicting signals about what it wants the programme to do and communicate – including how, where, and when. If this is the case, shout at them… in the nicest possible way, of course, and keep on going…

10. Keep it regular. From a director as guilty as any of occasional communications constipation, make sure that people communicate regularly – both internally and externally, and that your outputs come in a nice stream, not a large dollop.

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