Since its founding, the ERC – on the strength of its science, assisted by skillful media management – had built a sterling reputation for excellence in science. The scale of this achievement, in less than a decade, is unprecedented in the world; it took the NSF, NIH, DfG and other international counterparts a few generations to create this kind of image. But by 2015, interest in trying some new communications tactics, and reaching out to a wider audience, grew inside the agency – in part to defend its budget, but largely to extend its mission to increase the impact of its science across the EU.
From October 2015 through March 2019, the ERC=Science² consortium conducted a 42-month programme of communications to experiment with channels, messages and media, and thereby to find the best avenues for the ERC’s science to find its way to a broader European audience. Led by media company Science Business Publishing and joined by seven academic and association partners, the ERC=Science² project generated masses of content in text, video, audio and events based on ERC research in six popularly engaging scientific themes and released through large scale communications campaigns launched every 6 months:
• The Human City, February 2016
• Food, October 2016
• Longevity, March 2017
• Sensory Experience, October 2017
• Music, April 2018
• Artificial Intelligence, October 2018
The partners' task was to select from the vast range of ongoing ERC research a relative handful of projects that, in our view, would resonate with a wider European audience – in short, break beyond the scientific community.In the themes, we interviewed ERC researchers, wrote and published engaging long-form articles with interactive features, produced attractive videos, and developed “augmented reality” apps for smartphones. We managed a Web site with e-newsletters, promoted the researchers to press and social media, and organised events at science museums, universities and other venues.
Thus, the project found us organising a Turkish music ensemble in Toulouse (the researcher specialised in east-west musicology); an olive-oil tasting in Manchester (the researcher studied the Mediterranean diet); science cafés in Granada and Pilsen; visits by our travelling pop-up tent to shopping malls in Gdynia and Tartu - in short, we used every means possible (and affordable) to reach people, to spark their curiosity about science and their interest in one of the EU’s most successful undertakings. At the same time, we provided communications training to the researchers, and – not forgetting the ERC’s political stakeholders – organised public conferences and private VIP dinners in Brussels with MEPs, corporate executives and academic leaders. In short, no conventional communications channel was left untried.
