Share Your Science

Products in partnership with Comms Team

Explaining your work to a broad audience—across all ages and backgrounds—is a key first step to building connections with people and communities here at the university and beyond.

How to prepare to share your work

Clearly define your communication goals and priorities. Do you need to engage community members, increase funding, build stakeholder trust or something else?
Know your audience. You need different framing depending on who you hope to connect with. For example, are you communicating with rural or Indigenous communities, policymakers, journal editors, program managers, K12 teachers or students, or someone else?
Use plain and concise language to share the core message. For each project or finding, use a simplified statement about what you learned and why it matters. Consider preparing a one-minute elevator pitch and an "explain to me like I'm 5" pitch for different audiences.
Think about sharing location for each audience type. For example, press releases are broad and general to reach the public and policymakers; social media videos are short, fun snippets or interesting/weird facts to drive traffic to more information; and two-page project summaries are for expo events and VIP visitors.
Engage with the Comms Team early. Involve the team at the proposal stage to help articulate broader impacts, ensure your budget meets your needs, and plan how best to connect your work with the communities you need to reach.

Examples of communication products

These are the most common products that the Comms Team creates to support your research, but we are not limited to these! We'd also love to brainstorm new ways to help you get the word out.

Press releases & social media

The IARC Comms Team supports your research by creating press releases and short social media news stories to share your exciting research with a wider audience.

Approximate Comms FTE required: usually none

Print publications

The Alaska's Changing Environment report series and Knowing Our Changing Home are long-form publications that require extensive collaboration and time to produce.

Short publications like two-page project explainers, fact sheets, and briefs typically take a much shorter amount of time to produce.

Approximate Comms FTE required: .25 - 2 months
Professional printing costs required

Video

Video is a great way to show the process of your research. Consider bringing a Comms Team member into the field for a close look at your process. Team members can then work with a consultant or do in-house editing to produce a finished video.

Approximate Comms FTE required: 0-1 months

Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub web page snapshot

Websites

Most projects should, at a minimum, have a presence on the IARC main website's research pages. This is a service supported by IARC Comms.

If you have a large project with funding for five or more years or have a need for more interactive features like a news section, you will need to budget for support.

While Google Sites is also available to everyone, all IARC-related websites must meet ongoing federal accessibility requirements. If you plan to use Google Sites, we request that you work with the Comms Team to esure compliance.

Approximate Comms FTE required: 0 - 3 months

A house with landscaping illustration of fire-wise placement of space around house to protect structure

Graphics support

Examples include visually improving your graphs and figures, creating explainer or more technical illustrations, and developing figurative illustrations to support narrative stories and ideas. Graphic support is available on the Comms Team for a wide variety of products, from figures for peer-reviewed journal publications to infographics to children's book illustrations.

Approximate Comms FTE required: 0 - 3 months

Glacier Outburst Floods: Mendenhall Glacier

Story maps

The Glacier Outburst Floods story map was created by Diego Noreña as a summer communications internship project. It required extensive research and technical skill, as well as a focused couple of months of preparation and work.

Approximate Comms FTE required: 2 months

snapshot of front page of Alaska Voices website

Podcasts

A well-produced podcast is a great way to share your research and expertise with a wide audience. You could pitch an idea to an established production like Alaska Voices or start your own.

Experienced Comms Team members are available for a consultation on how to get started with podcasting and the approximate support you may need, depending on your goals.

Curriculum Support

Through partnerships with IARC Education/Outreach and groups like UAF Faculty Services, the Comms Team can help produce engaging learning experiences like the Navigating Actionable Science in the Arctic MOOC.

Approximate Comms FTE required: 6-12 months

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