By Hannah Harris
The first CREDS VIP programme invited visitors from across the world to visit CREDS institutions and elicited good interest. Unfortunately, however, Covid meant an international visitors’ programme was ill fated, although a few people have visited. Instead, we developed a new strategy: to develop a year-long series of content using innovative online formats, the aim of which was to showcase internationally leading CREDS research and to exchange knowledge in conversation with an international audience and, if possible, in collaboration with other UK-based consortia.
In practice, this turned into a series of webinars with associated podcasts, which have just been released as a series.
There were a number of reasons this seemed like a good idea:
This blog reflects on the process and what we learned.
One of the first things we needed was technical support. Sarah had recently featured in a UKERC podcast on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and had enjoyed working with Conor Drum, who delivers podcasts for UKERC. We used a platform called Zencastr which is very easy for guests to navigate, as it feels similar to a Zoom or Teams call, and Conor provided handy hints, such as finding a quiet place with a secure internet connection and making sure your mic works.
Just as important as these technical considerations was the advice to adopt a conversational tone, to prepare beforehand but not to read notes as this carries through in the voice, and to assume the audience is unfamiliar with the subject (so avoid jargon and don’t assume prior knowledge). Most importantly, the conversation should be enjoyable – if the participants enjoy it, the chances are the audience will too.
As part of the preparation, we developed questions to help our participants think about what they would say. Our podcasts followed directly on from webinars and so our participants were already very familiar with the subject and the other participants views on it, but the audience and means of delivery for the podcasts was very different. Academic-type presentations don’t work in a podcast format.
The questions therefore covered:
Podcasts shouldn’t involve too many people. In our case, we tended to have the moderator and around three experts, including at least one person from CREDS talking about an area of internationally-leading research, and at least one person from another country. They shouldn’t be too long – half an hour is about perfect, though ours vary quite widely in length.
We also had to think about the promotion of this work. We started by trying to find fairly punchy titles and interesting speakers, for whom we created impressive-sounding blurbs. The webinars the podcasts relate to were advertised using Eventbrite, emails and Twitter and happened over a number of months. For these, we worked to expand our stakeholder map beyond the UK by plugging into other international networks like the European Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (eceee), International Energy Agency (IEA), Hot or Cool Institute, Climate Change Committee (CCC) and Climate Compatible Growth (CCG). We also promoted them through our own Energy Demand Research Network (EDRN) and around twelve other UK-based energy consortia, asking them to promote more widely.
The promotion of the podcasts was handled differently, and they have just been packaged and released as a series. This involved hiring a voice-over artist to introduce and finish each one, developing a graphic to represent the series, uploading them onto anchor.fm and promoting via social media and digital newsletters. As such, although we featured three very different areas, the package as a whole has a unified feel.
In terms of the subject matter, we asked our themes to tell us what they wanted to do, taking a bottom-up, rather than a strategic approach to the content. This means the podcasts vary widely in scope, rather than being thematically linked, which might have been another way to produce a unified feel in a series. However, this approach allowed us to co-create the podcasts with CREDS colleagues and the partners they involved from other countries. In two cases, this actually meant promoting the reports of other organisations, though our researchers had contributed to them.
Although this is not as well represented in the podcasts as it was in the webinars, we tried to promote diversity in our speakers as much as possible, not just in terms of country but also demographic characteristics.
In reflecting on this experiment, more time to hone our approach and draw the podcasts together more tightly would have helped but, at this stage of the consortium, this was not possible. It is possible that some academics also still have a way to go in learning to speak to more public audiences – the subject matter and tone of the podcasts is still quite serious and reasonably dry if one is not steeped in the academic tradition. Nevertheless, we are happy to have taken an innovative approach to this work and are proud of the outcome. We hope you will consider popping on a podcast whilst you prepare your dinner or take a walk, and if you are interested in contacting us about the tools we used and lessons we learned, please do get in touch.
Hannah Harris is the Website & Communications Manager for CREDS