Sharing Researchers' Passion for Engaging Responsiveness - The European Researchers' Night in Italy in 2021

Project Information

SHARPER

Grant agreement ID: 101036106

DOI

10.3030/101036106

Project closed

EC signature date 29 April 2021

Start date 15 April 2021

End date 14 January 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 1 003 300,00

EU contribution

€ 692 000,00

Coordinated by

PSIQUADRO SOCIETA' COOPERATIVA - IMPRESA SOCIALE
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SHARPER (Sharing Researchers' Passion for Engaging Responsiveness - The European Researchers' Night in Italy in 2021)

Reporting period: 2021-04-15 to 2022-01-14

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

SHARPER 2021 project aim is to make visible, valuable and engaging for everybody the researchers’ ability to promptly react to crisis and their passion to prevent and harness new ones while addressing global goals actively engaging citizens. This aim will be pursued through effective communication formats and activities onsite, in strategic cities venues, and online with new communication approaches that make the researchers’ job a shared experience with a large audience across Italy and Europe.
SHARPER will highlight the strong connection between the researchers’ job and the global goals described by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 interpreted from the perspective of the EU strategy towards 2050.
The acronym SHARPER - Sharing Researchers’ Passion for Engaging Responsiveness summarizes all these elements.
The SHARPER Night 2021 was held in 16 cities: Ancona, Cagliari, Camerino, Catania, Genova, L'Aquila, Macerata, Nuoro, Palermo, Pavia, Perugia, Sassari, Terni, Torino, Trento, and Trieste, and where a national network of more than 250 partners successfully pursued some shared objectives:
convey the message that researchers are passionate persons who have a key role in tackling global challenges
• stress that the researchers are working to strengthen the engagement of social actors to reach common goals through a shared knowledge
• motivate young students to enter researcher careers and play a role in shaping the future
• broaden the meaning of what we call researchers beyond any stereotypes
• create social inclusion within the research process overcoming different social divides
• wisely combine online and onsite experiences to make research more accessible to different generations
• provide motivated audiences with opportunities of deeper exploration of the researchers’ work
• encourage children to discover researchers as role models because they are passionate and knowledgeable
• develop a national community of researchers who are also excellent communicators and connected with other researcher communicators in Europe
The project has reached its objectives and proved to be successful.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The national consortium and stakeholders’ network that developed the project SHARPER successfully adapted to the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic. The ERN programme was created including onsite, online and blended mode activities.
Like in the 2021, the SHARPER 28h Marathon was organised: a carousel of online activities developed by each city that generate a show schedule allowing almost 50.000 persons to travel across Italy and worldwide to the Antartica meeting researchers and discovering their job.
The full SHARPER 2020 programme included 966 activities developed by 3301 researchers actively involved in all the phases of the process, from the preparation phase to the implementation of the activities in 16 cities.
Pre-events during the summer and event for schools also strengthened the process involving over 12.000 people through events onsite developed respecting the social distancing and regulations due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Pre-events were a part of the awareness campaign also characterized by and intensive action online and offline as witnessed by the results listed below:
- Press releases on different channels: 301 total articles (online and written press) and 45 radio and broadcasting TV programs (among which RAI RADIO2-3, RaiNEWS24, SKY, RAI3) and all the local televisions in the territories involved
SHARPER 2021 had a very good impact since as demonstrated by the data of the awareness campaign:
- Website’s statistics (including all the partner main pages): Sharper Night www.sharper-night.it and Marathon (maratona.sharper-night.it): 82086 unique visitors
- Social networks
-- Facebook has been one of the main online social communication tools used in the awareness campaign to convey the Researchers Night messages and to inform a big number of people about detailed events in the programme.
Strategy: One unique SHARPER page or account for the 16 cities: https://www.facebook.com/sharper.night to keep the unicity of the event spread over towns.
“Promoted postlink”, proved to be extremely successful, allowing to advertise the events towards several different target audiences and related to different contents of the campaign, the target audience being divided by age, location, field of work, related interests.
Facebook Page @sharper.night - Total like to the page: 14.279 - 260.000 reached accounts
-- Twitter account @sharpernight: #sharpernight hashtag in national tendencies on September 24th with more than 16.000 tweets
-- YouTube Account (Sharper Night Official): more than 27.000 video views
- TOTAL VIDEO VIEWS (web, social, TV) 587.503

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The SHARPER project 2021 brilliantly evolved the experience accumulated over the last years and in particular during the edition 2020 when the digital and online dimension was heavily introduced in the development of the Night going beyond the state of the art thanks to a blended experience that combined the best lessons learned through onsite editions (2013-2019) and the first online version in 2020.
Some achievements, strengths, and weaknesses can be listed, and some potentials can be highlighted such as:
- Adaptability. A large network of 16 cities and more than 110 stakeholders successfully adapted to the evolving conditions of a critical context due to the Pandemic. The team strengthened a decision-making process based on periodical meetings and update and on shared experiences facing the same issues.
- Collaboration with the media cultural sector. The improvement of the online dimension required an increasing collaboration with media partners experts in TV-like productions. Contents must be conceived based on new audience engagement processes. Locations and venues must be selected to maximize the impact of the content presented.
- Blended formats. The definition of blended format must be explored and properly understood to make it effective. A blended format It is not just the live stream of an onsite event but a brand new approach to the interaction with the audience physically present onsite and the audience connected from other venues.
Some needs emerged from the 2021 experience:
- Social role of researchers. The pandemic, as well as the climate change and the green transition, have irreversibly put the researchers at the heart of the communication of complex issues. The development of activities for future Nights must include an increased number of participatory activities and dialogue events that actively engage citizens not only during the Night but all year round.
- Actions for schools. The continuity of the action all year round must be developed in collaboration with students and teachers that must be actively involved in the design and development of the activity since the beginning of the process.
- Training in research communication. An increasing need to avoid naive solutions to complex problems in research communication that emerged in the 2020 online edition was further confirmed in the 2021 edition. The blossoming of digital platforms for communication online required new kinds of communication training for researchers. Training shall increase the sense of researchers for the diversity of communication contexts and tools. Training opportunities to understand which skills are needed for which medium must be introduced.

SHARPER 2021 network summary - web site