Dialling up Publicity Levels

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Whenever I tell people about SR, including the people who already
somewhat know about it, think that it is utterly awesome. Some wonder
why they've not heard about it from elsewhere and/or wonder how we
managed to run it as volunteers.

With that in mind, I think there are a number of things which we
should do this year to really shout about ourselves more:
* Get something into the education supplements which will be appearing
for the new academic year (I think something may already be occurring
on this)
* Emit press releases more often -- definitely about KickStart and
*before* the Competition (as well as afterwards)
* Contact various national societies to tell them we exist. Examples
include: RAEng, IET, STEMNET. I'm aware we have had some contact
with these in the past, but nothing much seems to happen.

Crossover between the above to the proposed AMA on Reddit [0] may also
be worthwhile.

Some beneficial things which this could [1] provoke:
* Even more schools want to be involved [2]
* Volunteers appear from non-university sources
* Potential sponsors already know about us and think we're cool
* Employers/Unis are potentially more aware of us, providing more
gravitas to students having SR on their CVs, which is good for them,
and increases our own value in turn

I'm not expecting that we'll manage all of this in one go, but I do
think that we should aim to get something in the papers about the
start of the SR 2015 year.

Thoughts/volunteers?

Thanks,
Peter

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo/HOaiio5QI2k/discussion
[1] This is mostly wild speculation however.
[2] Not something that's currently an issue, but worth mentioning as
it would likely occur.

[Olly Smith]

On Tuesday, September 2, 2014 1:17:40 PM UTC+1, PeterJCLaw wrote:

* Contact various national societies to tell them we exist. Examples
  include: RAEng, IET, STEMNET. I'm aware we have had some contact
  with these in the past, but nothing much seems to happen.

I can get you in with the IET, i've not brought it up before because of fighting too many fires,  and because there's never been a concerted focus of publicity.

Crossover between the above to the proposed AMA on Reddit [0] may also
be worthwhile.

Audience of 20k, not to be sniffed at 

I'm not expecting that we'll manage all of this in one go, but I do
think that we should aim to get something in the papers about the
start of the SR 2015 year.

Thoughts/volunteers?

 

I will happily volunteer my heart and soul for this, it's something i've wanted to put work into anyway, and am currently doing with the SR tutorial videos. I think this is worthy of a [SIG-2015-PR] tag.

If we're going to go about this full guns blazing, i'd suggest:


* Visiting schools in person: Sixth forms don't have assemblies, but contacting schools, finding the teachers, talking to them, handing out pamphlets & posters, offering to organise a demonstration for students thinking about competing etc. Jon Bartlett would probably have a lot of good advice to give here. We can also ask SR team teachers for advice as well if need be. (Sidenote: Back when i was in first, they ran a award for raising awareness of the competition in the community, they made it an important part of the competition. Basically, it's a pyramid scheme, where teams do all the work for us)
* Visiting companies/societies in person to raise awareness: I've had experience on getting_the_foot_in_the_door with companies, they are very interested in meeting you and talking to you and finding out about SR, as long as you don't mention money. So company newsletters, coffee mornings, robot demonstrations to HR, that's where you start. Once we're friends, THEN, bring up the topic of potential sponsorship
* Clearly defining who is responsible for doing what, making sure a small team is regularly communicating with each other and SR at large, leaving them to their own work. Though when i've suggested that in the past it's reviled as loony talk --

[1] This is mostly wild speculation however.

It's not wild speculation, it's guaranteed, because doing something, anything, is better than our current zero organised PR. 

[Harry Cutts]

Hi,

On Tuesday, 2 September 2014 13:17:40 UTC+1, PeterJCLaw wrote:

* Contact various national societies to tell them we exist. Examples
  include: RAEng, IET, STEMNET. I'm aware we have had some contact
  with these in the past, but nothing much seems to happen.

I've had brief contact with the IET before [0], concerning advertising for volunteers through their network. I think I've still got a form somewhere which we could fill in and submit to advertise a "volunteer position" through them, although it's probably more formalised than we're used to.

I'm not expecting that we'll manage all of this in one go, but I do
think that we should aim to get something in the papers about the
start of the SR 2015 year.

I think we should definitely try and get local TV news involved early on, preferably from KickStart. Of course, a requirement of this would be media consent, but I would think that the TV station would manage this themselves.

Would it be beneficial to have a Special Interest Group on this? It would also be good to hear Andy Cottrell's thoughts on this, as he's responsible for Public Interaction on the committee.

Harry Cutts

[0] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo/EKeX4-I3wt0/discussion

[Andrew Cottrell]

Hi all

Apologies - I'm currently in the mix of moving house and having no internet, so I'm currently at work which limits the time I can spend on this email.

I sent my thoughts on Peters post to him before he made it public, but essentially it all sounds good, I don't have the time currently to work on it much. 

We definitely need to do some of these, for example STEMNET we've had a lot of rough approximate contact with before, but it would be good to get properly onto their radar.

With regards to the news articles, I agree we should be doing more of them as well. I think perhaps if we get a schedule of ones which we want, and when we want them it'll be a lot easier for us to work on them. Deadlines often help a lot in situations like this. Say if we said we need one out by the end of September about kickstart, etc and perhaps even put it on the SR calendar peter maintains this could help.

With regards to local TV, I was working on attempting to get them probably about a month before the competition, periodically attempting to communicate with them - I think we may have made a good contact this year through luck, but I'm not sure what's the best way to actually get about this - it often seems like you need to know an actual person there for it to work well.

Cheers,

Andy

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Andrew Cottrell

http://ultimationee.blogspot.com