CONFERENCE SPOTLIGHTS BEST WAYS TO COMMUNICATE SCIENCE

by Gail Porter and Diana Steele

The following is excerpted from the proceedings of the March 2002 conference, Communicating the Future: Best Practices for Communication of Science and Technology to the Public. The proceedings were published in October 2002.

For a segment of the Tonight Show, host Jay Leno asked passersby on the streets of Los Angeles random questions about science.

How long does it take the Earth to go around the sun? he asks.

Twenty-four hours, two people in succession reply.

What causes the tides? he asks.

Boats? Fish? the next person earnestly replies.

Leno's informal survey was highlighted by Paula Apsell, executive producer of the public television program Nova, in a keynote talk at the conference, Communicating the Future: Best Practices for Communication of Science and Technology to the Public.*

The at-times startling ignorance of average U.S. adults of basic scientific facts has been documented not only by Leno but also in annual surveys conducted by the National Science Foundation. NSF reports that 50 percent of U.S. adults surveyed dont know that it takes a year for the Earth to orbit the sun. Similarly, 50 percent of respondents believe that early humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs and that atoms are smaller than electrons.

Many in the scientific community believe that lack of knowledge about science and technology is the root cause for a variety of ills: inadequate government funding for specific research areas; a shortage of students choosing technical careers; and the popularity of fad diets and dubious health aids based on pseudoscience.

Research institutions and other organizations carry out science and technology communications programs for many different reasons. Some believe that when people know more about science and technology they will better appreciate and support scientific institutions. Still other institutions have started such programs because their research is supported by tax dollars and they feel an obligation to tell the public how its money is being spent.

Regardless of the motivation, science communications programs for lay audiences take many forms. Some are education programs that target at-risk youth; others are public relations efforts aimed at improving an institutions image; others are specific media-relations campaigns or museum exhibits on a particular scientific advance. The Best Practices Conference provided a rare opportunity for science communicators in many different venueseducators, researchers, media-relations professionalsto share both their successes and their frustrations in communicating the results of research advances.

Criteria for model programs

In selecting model programs to be featured at the meeting, the conference steering committee approached its task from the following perspective: What does the communications research literature say about the most effective ways to carry out science and technology communications programs, and which programs using these techniques or best practices are most easily adopted by a wide range of institutions?

The committee solicited entries from research-sponsoring institutions such as universities, government agencies, corporations, or non-profit organizations; from public education institutions, such as museums or non-profit Web-based enterprises; or from third parties, such as public relations agencies engaged by these entities in their communications efforts. Categories included:

• direct-to-consumer programs
• programs for specialized media
• scientist-based programs
• programs for legislators and opinion leaders
• programs for the general media
• programs intended for children (outside of classroom instruction)

The committee received more than 150 entries from which 48 best practice communications programs were selected based on the following criteria:

• presents content with clarity
• identifies a discrete audience
• uses appropriate formative and evaluative research
• illuminates both the process and product of science or technology
• adapts easily to other settings or organizations

The conference was originally scheduled for Sept. 26-28, 2001. But after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 shut down Reagan National Airport and disrupted travel for government employees, the committee decided to postpone the meeting for six months.

Despite this setback, interest in the conference remained high and it was sold out months in advance. When the conference finally convened in March, nearly 300 people attended. They represented institutions from across the United States and several foreign countries, including Canada, the U.K., Brazil, Australia, Belgium, Trinidad, and Japan. Participants included science communication specialists from universities, national laboratories, research institutions, and hospitals; journalism professors; communication researchers; science museum curators; scientists; educators; and government officials.

In reviewing and selecting topics to be presented as posters at the conference, the steering committee was struck by a number of repeating themes, elements, or techniques that many of the best programs had in common. Programs that used these elements tended to be engaging, relevant, substantive, and often more creativeall characteristics that boosted success as measured by such factors as size of audiences, number of Web hits, and longevity of support. Not coincidentally, many of these same themes emerged in the keynote talks and topical lectures presented during the conference program.

See sidebar on research and evaluation . . .

However, in submission after submission, the conference committee also noted that while research institutions routinely review past research in a given technical field before funding additional projects in the same area, few organizations systematically use the results of research in the field of science communication to design their communication programs.

In many cases, managers of public communications programswho come from related fields such as journalism, political science, education, or a specific scientific or technical disciplineare not even aware that this research literature exists. In other cases, the daily stress of continually producing the products of science communications programs such as newsletters, Web pages, magazines, exhibits, or broadcast programs tends to consume science communicators to the detriment of long-term planning for evaluation of those programs.

Defining successful public relations

A 10-year, comprehensive effort sponsored by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Research Foundation to determine the defining characteristics of excellent public relations programs produced a wealth of conclusions, many of which are relevant to improving science communications programs. Yet, few practicing science communicators at the Best Practices conference were aware of the study.

Speaker James Grunig, professor of communications at the University of Maryland and the director of the IABC Excellence project, described the studys methodology, which involved conducting surveys and interviews with public relations mangers, practitioners, and CEOs of more than 300 organizations.

The Excellence project concluded that the best public relations programs had the following qualities in common:

• Public relations is a unique management function that helps an organization interact with the social, political, and institutional components of its environment.
• Public-relations departments strategically plan, administer, and evaluate public relations programs.
• Public relations helps to shape the underlying conditions of organizational excellence (for example, through employee communications programs).
• Public relations is empowered by the dominant coalition (the people with the most power in an organization) and is not subordinated to marketing or other management functions.
• Public relations is two-way and symmetrical.
• Public relations executives serve as ethics counselors and internal advocates of social responsibility (the conscience, or the thinking heart of the organization).

The committee received more than 150 entries from which 48 best practice communications programs were selected . . .

The role of public relations is not just to affect the public, but also to bring in information from the public to inform managements decisions.

This two-way communication involves:

• Disclosure: not only is the organization open about its activities, but the public comes to the organization when perceives a problem.
• Accuracy: the public can predict what the organization is thinking, and vice versa.
• Understanding: the organization and its strategic publics share understanding about the organizations mission.
• Agreement: The organization and its strategic publics agree that something is good or bad, something should be done about it, and they evaluate it in the same way.
• Symbiotic behavior: the public helps the organization accomplish its mission, but the organization also behaves in such a way that it makes the community a better place to live and the organization a better place to work.

Methods for measuring the success of a communications strategy involve conducting surveys and interviews, as well as observation (such as watching visitors interact with exhibits) and focus groups.

This is in contrast to traditional metrics of communication that measure one-way communication, such as, how many people heard the message, showed up at an open house, how many press clippings mentioned the institution, how many people say good things about you, buy your product, etc.

Counting the number of media clippings is a poor measure of the success of a communications program, except possibly for monitoring the performance of media relations staff.

General surveys of attitudes, image, and reputation are also poor metrics of communications programs because they are affected by many other things, such as day-to-day decision making by an organizations management that are beyond an organizations public relations programs. The Excellence project found that the use of advertising equivalencies (describing the value of news stories generated by public relations efforts in term of the dollar value of paid ads of the same size) was so inherently misleading a practice that public relations professionals should consider use of such comparisons as unethical.

Effects of new media

The changing nature of communication media may be the biggest single challengeand opportunityfacing communicators. Just as the advent of television added images to sound and brought about a revolution in the way organizations communicated with their constituencies, the Internets direct interface with consumers has brought about a profound change in the nature of communication itself.

Science and technology communications with the public by research, education, and other institutions is undergoing a renaissance of ideas and techniques. Gone are the days when science communicators could issue a simple printed press release, deliver it to the major networks and newspapers, wait to see if the topic would be covered, and feel confident that they had done their best for their institution.

See sidebar on "Best Practice" examples . . .

The ability of organizations to publish materials directly to a worldwide audience through the Web has dramatically reduced their previous dependence on intermediaries such as television or newspaper reporters to carry messages to important publics. A corollary to this change is the much larger number of news choices now available to consumers. Network television news no longer dominates public discourse, and a spot on the evening news should no longer be viewed as a major benchmark of communications success.

The events of Sept. 11 illustrated how dramatically journalism has changed. People tuned in to watch events unfolding before their eyes and they have kept watching. Since Sept. 11, the audience for news has increased, in general, but more people are getting that news from the Internet, where it is available 24 hours a day and where Web casts can be replayed whenever convenient.

The splintering of video programming among broadcast, cable, satellite, and the Internet has opened up more choices for the consumers and more news markets for science communicators. Among these increased programming choices are channels like Discovery Health and Discovery Technology. While more science and technology programming should be good for science communications, the portion of that material that is, in fact, pseudoscience is a cause for concern.

The trend in television newscasting is toward shorter and shorter segments, with more medical and weather coverage. More time is spent on weather than any other story in a local newscast, which makes weathercasters a prime conduit for passing on environmental and other weather-related science news to consumers.

At the same time, niche programs like public televisions Nova are holding their own by emphasizing challenging content and storytelling for topics like genomics, cosmology, and string theory, which increasingly are illustrated with high-end computer graphics.

Today's science and technology communicators need a much broader array of skills than their predecessors. They need to understand both the technologies and the aesthetics of multimedia, interactivity, and the Web. They need to view their job as a facilitator for good relations between their institutions and the various segments of the public important to their institutions. They need to be actively engaged in the day-to-day decision-making of their institutions as a voice for institutional social responsibility. They need to be familiar with the robust body of research underway in the field of communications and they need to keep abreast of new developments lest they find themselves delivering messages to a general public years after others have realized that it is a figment of a previous generations imagination.

Equally critical for the success of science and technology communications is research before, during, and after a communications program is developed. Conducting communications efforts without research and evaluation, noted Grunig, is a bit like sending out a fleet of buses without ever bothering to check if they made it to their destinations.

One thing that is not likely to change now or in the future is the central role of clear, engaging, relevant content. As long as there are discoveries being made and technologies being created, institutions will continue to need effective translators who can drill through the often opaque world of technical achievement to view and describe the fascinating scenes inside.

Gail Porter is Public Affairs Specialist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and co-organizer of the Best Practices conference.

Diana Steele is a San Diego-based freelance science writer and managing editor of ScienceWriters.

*The conference Communicating the Future: Best Practices for Communication of Science and Technology to the Public was held March 68, 2002, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in Gaithersburg, Md. (See http://www.nist.gov/bestpractices.)

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