Since the launch of the Science Museum Group’s Inspiring Futures strategic priorities, where a core priority is to ‘grow science capital in individuals and society’, as a team, our role has been to disseminate the science capital research, practical approach, and tools across our organisation.
How did we start to distribute information about our courses and resources with over 2,000 staff across five different sites?
Our first port of call was to identify existing channels of communication that we could utilise across all our sites. The initial announcements were made using our weekly and monthly newsletters and site-wide bulletins, as well as speaking at all-staff briefings and team meetings.
We found that face-to-face communications are the most effective for getting the message out there and for sign posting the courses and resources we offer teams, and the ways that they can engage with these. They also give people the opportunity to meet us in person, ask us questions and start to share the worries and concerns they might have.
Digital has also been a really useful and important tool, it allowed us to share the approach across the group in a variety of ways. We published a page on the group-wide intranet to host all the available resources including downloadable materials. We have also developed an online course about the science capital research for all staff – more to come on this in a future blog post.
How did we utilise hard copies of our materials to help communicate the message?
A small desktop ‘at-a-glance’ handout has been an essential element of our suite of science capital resources. Every person who works across all of our museums has received a hard copy of this A6 concertina foldout booklet to keep in their line of sight and regularly refer to.
After identifying key distribution contacts, this booklet was distributed to every volunteer and member of staff across our museums. It is handed out at all of our staff and volunteer inductions and to all course participants on our Academy training courses.
The concertina is a condensed version of our ‘Engaging all audiences with STEM’ booklet.
How do we continue to communicate?
Science capital hasn’t been an easy term or idea for everyone to understand, and we know that a single introduction to the approach will not lead to instant application of the research and good practice.
We know that using and applying this research will take a long time, and that communication is a continuous process, during which we have to keep connected with people and teams across the group.
Here we’ve shared a small part of how we began this process and some of the key elements to our communication. We have some new ideas and plans in the pipeline to help us to continue this, but, seeing how far we’ve come gives us a sense of excitement for the future of the science capital approach across the group.
Upcoming posts in our organisational change series will feature the development of the online course and the challenges we faced embedding the approach. Previous posts include information on the suite of courses and resources we developed, and how we began the process of embedding the approach across the Science Museum Group.