Extending the reach of your training: Successfully engaging researchers

A one-day workshop for staff-supporting researchers, held at the University of Surrey. This workshop, run by Rosemary Stamp for Vitae South East Hub, was designed to give participants tips and techniques to extend the reach of their researcher development training courses and programmes to encourage participation.

It covered issues such as:

·         How do you persuade researchers to attend your skills development courses?

·         How do you reach the hard-to-reach?

·         How do you convince supervisors and PIs of the benefits their researchers gain from your programme?

·         How do you manage the profile of your programme in your institution and beyond?

The immediate feedback from the participants was overwhelmingly positive:

“It was a fantastic workshop. A huge amount of ideas and information was imparted, but without feeling hurried…. I made some great contacts at other institutions - a rewarding day indeed!”

“I left feeling empowered, informed, motivated and excited. I feel I now have the basic tools and ideas to make our comms. 'strategy' real and effective. Awesome.”

Six months after the workshop we followed up with a selection of the participants to see if the workshop had made an impact on their activities. The response was mostly positive. One participant commented:

“We put together a small communications and marketing group, tasked to improve comms and marketing of our researcher development programme, and will be using some of the advice and ideas from the workshop. We have identified that different groups prefer different communication methods, and we are in the process of practically implementing changes to work with this information. We are reviewing the tone / voice of our messages to different groups, and the way in which we promote courses. “