Exploring new ways to engage people at scale
One of the things I love about the public engagement community is that we are super-skilled at finding creative ways to engage the public with research.
Over the last 20–30 years, we’ve seen amazing exhibitions, performances, workshops, talks, debates and interactive experiences delivered by this community.
If you have designed one of these programmes, you’ve probably heard someone ask you the dreaded question…
‘Does it scale?
Why do we care about scalability?
As it stands, the public play a limited role in using, informing or trusting research.
This is largely because the existing opportunities to engage are designed in a way that lends itself well to smaller numbers of people, or small (albeit important) niche groups.
Given that much of public engagement happens face to face, when we explore ways to scale, we often turn towards the following three options:
- Tour: Take an activity that works and replicate it across different locations.
- Repeat: Run several opportunities over a longer period, providing more instances to sign up.
- Space: Host the activity within a location that can accommodate large numbers of people.
And if we have the time and the budget, we might try to do all three!
Although technically, these are great ways to reach more people, they are still limited — they rely heavily on the public signing up and attending in person, often within their (ever more squeezed) personal time.
Finding new models for scale
Now more so than ever, we need to get better at developing models for engagement that help us reach people no matter where they are. In a post-COVID-19 world, this feels particularly important, both for global foundations like Wellcome, as well as more locally driven organisations engaging people within their community.
Over the last year, the public engagement team at Wellcome have asked the following questions as a way of exploring new models that have the potential for engagement at scale:
What new models can we stress test as a way of developing exemplars for public engagement professionals to try?
How might we join up and strengthen established mechanisms that reach audiences at scale so they are more than the sum of their parts?
Is there a correlation between the trust and affiliation with a brand and people’s own attitudes and behaviours? If so, how might we enable brands to better engage their audiences on what matters regarding their health?
How might we enable effective conversations online, and foster a better health information environment?
In considering these questions, we’ve explored collaborations with publishing houses and their brands with access to large audiences; we’ve held workshops with leaders of digital engagement platforms to understand priority areas for development; and we’ve funded a new experimental initiative to reach people in spaces where we spend most of our time — at work.
Many of these activities are still in development, but in partnership with Shift, we have recently released an open and growing collection of projects from around the world that are working to make the Internet a healthier place for health information. You can read more about that here.
We plan to share more about our work in this space as it develops. In the meantime, if you have also been experimenting in new ways to engage audiences at scale, please do share your experiences below — we’d love to hear more.
