Engaging Audiences with Research
Further routes to engaging large audiences - programme Items and other platforms
Depending on the nature of your research, it may be best suited to reach an audience via an existing series, for example Trust Me I'm A Doctor or The One Show. Or it might work better for other platforms, such as BBC iWonder, or a smartphone app, which allows you to put your research at the fingertips of people worldwide. The Academic Ideas Lab has experience in getting research to large audiences through these routes, and can help you pursue these if they might be the best options for your research.
Impact Evidencing
We strive to be at the leading edge of practice when it comes to evidencing impact, and it is an inbuilt part of our work. However, you may have taken part in another broadcast project and would like some metrics from it. We may be able to help in this case, even if we weren’t part of it from the beginning.
If you are a documentary impact producer or an outreach funder and are looking for support with evaluation and report writing, talk to us!
Producer Enquiry Management
Emails and phone calls from TV researchers can take up a huge amount of academics’ time, particularly when the enquirer wants to ask questions about elements of the academic’s research at length. They usually end up going nowhere, but not responding to the one enquiry that does could mean losing a chance to appear on an influential documentary.
Ideas Lab can save valuable staff time by handling your incoming enquiries from programme researchers. We pass back to academics only those opportunities that are most likely to result in a programme that will boost the profile of your research, your experts and your institution’s reputation.
We understand the development process and know most of the companies in the industry, as well as the commissioners. We can advise on how much time an academic should spend on an enquiry at each stage, whether the academic should be paid and whether the institution should make other charges.
Note – institutions' own press offices are the best place to deal with quick turnaround enquiries from the print and news media.
Using your academic expertise behind the scenes
Producers sometimes seek to employ academic experts as part of the development or production team - to help design and run experiments, to ensure that scripts convey the facts clearly, or to advise on the very latest thinking in the field. The Academic Ideas Lab sources academics for these roles, which can be a stimulating way to get paid to use your expertise in the real world, on programmes which reach millions of people.