Supporting excellent research with real life impact since 2020, KURIE has been running a series of successful workshops for staff. These included:
KURIE Sustainable Development Goals
Identifying and evaluating suitable options and pathways for sustainability will play a key role in identifying the most positive, efficient, and coherent pathways to achieving the United Nations Sustainability Goals (UN SDGs). This workshop helped attendees look at research through this lens. In this session, we explored how aspects of research/discipline contribute to one or more SDG’s and explore the potential for the discipline to interconnect with other disciplines or areas of expertise to make creative leaps. Attendees were also encouraged to think of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that bring different disciplines, sectors, and types of knowledge (traditional, practitioner, expert, citizen, and so on) together to help illuminate all aspects of complex social, environmental, and economic challenges, and explore co-design and co-production approaches, which work closely with policy makers and users of knowledge.
Initiating and retaining stakeholder relationships
This workshop was designed to give the tools that help researchers identify avenues for their research to go beyond the walls of academia. We discussed how to increase the visibility of research and heard from established academics about how they developed their stakeholder relations. This successful event received a repeat session in October and was also held on our Medway campus.
Generating and Capturing Impact Through Strong Stakeholder Relationships
This face-to-face workshop was held on Canterbury campus and was aimed at helping researchers understand why sustainable relationships with stakeholders are important for evidence gathering. This session aimed to identify how to build such relationships and engage with end users to extend networks and maximise research impact.
Evidencing Impact Workshop
Evidencing impact is becoming increasingly important. Well-evidenced impact has not only become an expectation in the context of the REF, but various funding and award applications are also increasingly wanting to see it. This workshop provided tools to understand how to evidence impact. Attendees discussed what does and doesn’t work for different types of impact and what pieces should be part of a good evidence parcel. Attendees also learnt how to obtain strong testimonies. This successful event received multiple repeat sessions on both Canterbury and Medway campuses, as well as online.
Using social media to create your public profile
Stakeholders use all kinds of social media, and if you’re not using it to engage them, you’re missing a major opportunity. Facebook has 1.11 billion active users. Twitter has 55 million. Add to that LinkedIn’s 255 million members and the billion unique visitors to YouTube every month, and it’s certain that many of the stakeholders are using at least one major social network. But how do you use social media to inform and collaborate with your stakeholders and to showcase your research? This workshop highlighted top tips on how to create a public profile and for making social media part of your stakeholder engagement strategy.
The Research Excellence Team is rerunning the full series next year and divisions can book divisional reruns of these workshops as well. Further to this, the Research Excellence Team has some recordings of workshops available on the KURIE moodle page and is currently working on developing new events.