My first communication board meeting

So, here I am. All prepared. Behind my MacBook Air. Logged in to Appear.in  for my first video conference. Topics are the communication plan, branding and blogging. These are very interesting topics, I do say.

I invited all the members to join, on Slack. And I wrote an email to the people who didn’t respond to my Slack message.

However, looking at the attendees and response, nobody cared about the communication meeting. I was alone, online, together with the coordinator of the project. So that makes 2 persons out of 8. Auch!

So what went wrong?

I asked to the coordinator if these persons do exist as I didn’t heard of them before. And I never met them in real life. He assured me: they are real.

And then I remembered…the words of another researcher…

This clever researcher warned me. He knew. He writes dissemination plans on distributing the results of research. I was in contact with him to explore the line between communication and dissemination.

So, it is true. I’ll need to convince everyone in the consortium (=researchers in the project) that communication is important. Especially in research.

The next offline meeting I’ll do a 30′ presentation about communication. And I will kick ass. Not theirs, of course. But, I’ll make them see that communicating is vital for EU research.

Karen Soens is a communication strategist. She loves strong coffee & communication. She believes that communication should be designed from bottom-up. She’s a part-time researcher at LUCA, School of Arts for MUV. She has an agency ‘De Bosduif‘ that designs communication plans for social profit organizations.