17. Bonnie Johnson & Anna Dennis on strategic comms for research orgs
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Episode show notes
Today's episode is a deep dive with Bonnie Johnson and Anna Dennis from the Academy of Social Sciences.
Bonnie is the Academy's Communications Director with over 15 years of diverse experience in comms and marketing, specialising in not-for-profits. Anna is the Academy's Communications Manager with an honours in sociology and experience in the NGO space.
Over the last four years, Bonnie and Anna have achieved incredible things for the Academy, including the Seriously Social podcast reaching more than 100,000 downloads in three years and increasing the Academy's newsletter open rate from 12% to 47%.
In this episode, we use these initiatives as case studies to explore how Bonnie and Anna transformed the comms and engagement approach at the Academy of Social Sciences.
Whether you're the leader of a research org, a professional staff member, or an individual researcher, this episode is packed with actionable insights for boosting your reach!
Our conversation covers:
Setting clear goals for communications strategies
Identifying and understanding your target audience
Developing effective newsletters with high open rates
Creating and refining podcast content
Building and managing an effective communications team
Building trust in comms roles
Implementing and adapting communications strategies
Tracking metrics and providing regular progress reports
Leveraging technology and tools for efficient communication
Find Bonnie and Anna online:
Practical tips:
Newsletter success:
Use compelling subject lines, maintain consistency, and ensure the content is well-written and engaging.
Analyse previous editions to identify the best times for release and adapt based on audience behavior.
Visual communication:
Invest in tools like Canva to maintain visual consistency and streamline the creation process.
Understanding your audience(s):
Create audience avatars/personas/profiles to better understand and target your communication efforts.
Map out key stakeholders and tailor your messaging to resonate with each group.
Consistency, adaptation, and trust:
Meet your audience where they are and establish a consistent communication voice.
Adapt your strategies based on feedback and changing audience needs.
- Public engagement
- Career development
- Team alignment
- Storytelling
- Your pitch
- Listening
- Mentorship
- Collaborating with professional staff
- Communicating in different formats/mediums
- Comedy
- Failure
- Stakeholder/audience mapping
- Philanthropic funding
- Relationship management
- Community engagement
- Making your work relatable
- Feedback
- Playfulness
- Talks and presentations
- Representing your discipline
- DEI
Quotes:
"You create these avatars. We do about three to four usually. So let's name them… It's Melanie. She's 32. She reads the conversation. She reads a bit of news. She's also on Facebook. She follows this. This is her career. This is her income. This is her family life. This is where she commutes." - Bonnie Johnson (on creating audience avatars)
"Sometimes when you get that request of a general audience or general public, it can be helpful to actually break it down into a niche." - Bonnie Johnson
“It's important to continually benchmark the work that you're doing. But also, yeah, think about your audience and their changing needs. It's not just about what you want to communicate to somebody. It's what they want to hear. So it's a fine balance, I think, where we've clearly got things we need to communicate to them, things we've achieved, done, want them to contribute to. But really thinking about how will they best engage with this and how is it relevant to them and how does it speak to them?“ — Bonnie Johnson
"If you're beginning an initiative, you really have to meet people where they are. I think once you establish consistency, you establish your voice, you can bring people along with you a little bit as well. Maybe the way that we communicate with our audience now, we would not necessarily have done four years ago, but they know us now. They have confidence in what we're putting out and the way that we're communicating with them. And I think that gives us permission to be a little bit more creative or a little bit more bold." - Anna Dennis
“It's about figuring out where your particular resources are going to have the most impact. And while there may be great potential growth areas, if you're not equipped to do that, if you don't have the team or the resources at the time, I've found in this organisation and in other organisations I've volunteered for, it just chews up so much energy and leads to not a great result. And I think an example of that is, you know, videos. Video was a huge growth area on social media and still is obviously in different formats, and I've seen organisations just completely get swamped, putting all of their energy on tiny, tiny little budgets into video when, yeah, there is potential for growth there, but maybe that particular organisation's impact can be found somewhere else, better bang for your buck, I think.“ — Anna Dennis
“We wouldn't have known that except to do it, to get in and just give it a go. And one of the things I would share to you in comms often is I think, as you mentioned, Chris, people can feel quite daunted, but sometimes you just have to get started. It will not be perfect. When Anna and I, in preparing for this interview, went back to look at what we did in 2020. So cringe, some of it, it's like, Oh, I would never do that now, but you kind of don't know until you get into it and get stuck in.” – Bonnie Johnson
"Comms needs a little bit of a PR overhaul itself, especially in research. When we started, comms was kind of sequestered in the overall strategic plan of the academy… It's kind of a dirty word, like communications marketing. It doesn't necessarily have the gravitas of the other kinds of work we do." - Anna Dennis
“So when it began as a strat comms, the metrics were on open rates, mainly subscriber growth or decrease, our followers on social media, our website hits, and then podcast downloads as well. But over time, our policy team was then like, Hey, can you also tell us how many people have read that submission? Can you please tell us how many people have written in about X, Y, Z. So we're now collecting data that is much further beyond just the comms. So we are now collecting data on, people who are applying for grants with our organisation, the website page hits, as I mentioned, not just generic, like, Oh, this is how many are going to the website. But actually this month we did three posts on this particular event and this event page got this many. So we can track that back, and the data is quite rich.“ — Bonnie Johnson
On what makes a successful newsletter: "A really good subject line... Consistency… And it has to be well written…. Make it interesting, the content snappy." - Bonnie Johnson
"It's been so valuable for us to reach those broader audiences as we've spoken about. And I didn't understand that when I started working there. And when I was exposed to comms, I didn't really understand the potential beyond posting on social media and ticking those boxes." - Anna Dennis
"We couldn't just talk to the people who already knew what was going on. So I guess the process was for me in events, it was kind of looking at what is happening in the event space more broadly, maybe outside of academia, and trying to see like what the steps were to get us a little bit closer to those big conferences that draw in people from lots of different sectors and bring together different thinkers." - Anna Dennis
“But as you mentioned about the quick wins before Chris, you do have to get some of those on the board to just get going, I think a little bit and start to demonstrate the power of communications. And I'm pleased to report we have a slightly bigger team now because we have proved ourselves, I should mention to actually just for your listeners that the podcast did have contractors, like a sound engineer and an editor who were not in house. So we didn't have to do that as well, which is a huge task.“ — Bonnie Johnson
“You’re working with people who are researchers and scientists, and they want to see evidence for things. If you need more support or more resourcing, and you can show them something, I think there are a lot of people who are going to approach it very logically, and hopefully we'll get on board.” — Chris Pahlow
“One of the key messages I think people can take away from this episode is to really open your mind as much as you can as to what kind of activities you should consider, and which ones are going to be most appropriate for your impact goals and the different audience groups you want to engage with.“ – Chris Pahlow
“Improving the engagement or stakeholder management on behalf of an academic organisation, it has to be multi-faceted and a lot of really effective work can be done empowering other people within that organisation or other teams. It doesn't have to just be putting out press releases every week. “ – Chris Pahlow
"I think it's very easy to pick people in recruitment who tick the boxes and maybe have the exact skills you're looking for. But in my experience, I found it much more valuable to have people around who understand what the point is and who are thoughtful and creative. And I think skills can come afterwards." - Anna Dennis
