The preceding activities of the Night were part of the awareness campaign - on-line and off-line activities. Pre-events, a few presentations of research professions and work were performed at kindergartens, primary and secondary schools across the country in order for them to get to know researchers from various scientific fields. Most of them visited schools that they used to attend when young. They delivered, beside the messages of the project, also more personal messages such as I was sitting in your chair once and now I am here! You can do it to! Some pre-events were organized especially for researchers, informing them about Horizon Europe and how to write a successful application for programmes in Horizon Europe. The awareness campaign of the HUMANITIES ROCK! Project is twofold: online with a website and social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and You tube) constantly updated with information (videos, programmes, descriptions, follow-ups, etc.) about the Researchers` Night 2020 project and in by more traditional means with printed materials (e.g. posters, programme leaflets, roll ups). For awareness campaign we organised conferences, round tables, workshops, storytelling for kindergarten children, archeological events, observation nights at Observatory Golovec, Ljubljana.
At the European Researchers' Night 2020, we organised 64 pre-events and 55 events on 27 November 2020. Most pre-events and events on ERN were organized in an online version, due to the epidemiological situation, because of covid-19. 119 events were prepared by 313 researchers from 13 different faculties and academies from the University of Ljubljana and the first time with partner Faculty of Arts Banja Luka, Bosnia and Hercegovina. Researchers covered all different fields of research work (humanities, natural science, social science, etc.). We also involved 6 MSCA IF fellows and 14 researchers funded by the H2020 and other EU programmes. Many events in 2020 were dedicated to women in science, as this is the one of main themes this year. The other theme is Humans and research. Our aim was to inform the general public about what researchers do. Because all of this years’ ERN events were online, many in a form of video, is not possible to determine completely the demographical and statistical data of the participants. But we can see a big increase of the number of attendees in our events. The overall number of attendees was 61.578 and the estimate number of people made aware of the European Researchers' Night and its objectives 900.000.
The Proactive Social Role of Science – was completely aimed towards researchers to inform them about EU projects, new possibilities of applying for EU projects and workshops. The HUMANITIES ROCK project activities were covered by the national television and radio, regional tv and radio, nationaland regional newspapers and many digital media.
To mesure the impact of our project in 2020: Filling in 581 web survey questionnaires (414 before and 167 after the main event), web-based and promoted events (estimated 61.578 attendees) and »My Career« activities (39 events). Main conclusion: the attitudes toward humanities and social sciences are more positive than in 2019. Consistently, age has a statistically significant effect in all cases. Gender, education and wave of measurement also have effect in some cases. Statistics of the web platforms shows quite good interest for the events. Especially with the project's web page, Instagram, Facebook page and YouTube it can be seen that there was an impact of the main event on the interest of people for the project. There was more interest on project's web page and on YouTube than in 2019. This impact can be largely attributed to the special circumstances due to epidemiological measures which encouraged or even enabled at all organization of events.
The project HUMANITIES ROCK! was highlighted as the best practice example in the European Commission's Horizon 2020 project report, which is a special recognition of the project quality. The report is published on the website of the Publications Office of the European Union (
https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/4f198f8e-4599-11eb-b59f-01aa75ed71a1/language-en/format-PDF/source-183013539(opens in new window)).
