Designing your Outreach Plan

Last updated on 2023-11-06 | Edit this page

Estimated time: 35 minutes

Overview

Questions

  • What research audience do you want to work with?
  • How will you use the team agreement for outreach with your chosen audience?

Objectives

  • Create a list of potential outreach audiences
  • Exchange effective outreach practices with peers
  • Familiarize yourself with outreach materials provided and plan next steps

Identify your Local Audience

Now that you have some familiarity with the Open Science Team Agreement let’s think about how you can use them with your research audience. First let’s brainstorm some potential audiences. This outreach can be at the level of a department, lab, or group.

Departments

What departments do you cover? Take a look at their departmental website and identify one or two faculty members

  • Can you tell how open their current research is?
  • Do they have their own profile page, website, or GitHub repository that you can consult?
  • Consult OSF institutions, preprints or registrations to search for affiliated contributors.
  • How and when does this department meet? (In person, online, etc)

Lab groups

  • Follow department event and seminar topics
  • Search campus data and publication repositories, profile systems for possible champions/interested groups

Open science groups

Are there any working groups, journal clubs or other community groups that focus on open science? Examples:

Find your Champion (5 min)

Following the prompts above, reflect on your network and identify a research audience you want to target. Share one idea with the group.

Outreach Strategies

Recognizing that outreach is a difficult aspect of librarianship, let’s discuss concrete strategies you can use for more successful outreach with research teams.

Discussion: Outreach Wins and Woes (10 min)

What has and hasn’t worked when connecting with your audience in the past?

Plan your Outreach

Let’s wrap up by putting it all together into a plan!

Outreach Resources

Email Outreach Template

What messaging will resonate with your audience? Consider how you might adapt the following email template for your selected audience.

Hi [Faculty Meeting Organizer’s Name],

I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to suggest a topic for your upcoming faculty meeting: Open Science Team Agreements.

Open Science is all about making research more transparent and collaborative, which can benefit us and our students in many ways. I’d love to share some practical tips and insights on how we can adopt Open Science principles in the department. I’m promoting an Open Science Team Agreement that can help researchers make open science actionable.

If it fits your next meeting’s agenda, could we slot in a brief presentation on this topic? I think it could spark some interesting discussion.

Looking forward to your thoughts on this.

Thanks, [Your Name]

Slide Deck and Handout

This Open Science Team Agreement outreach slide deck is available for you to customize for your audience and timing.

Possible edits include:

  • Adding your library logo
  • Adding info about your library services
  • Adding examples relevant to your audiences domain
  • Cutting or adding content

Customizable Slides - hint: after navigating to GitHub, click “view raw” to download the slides.

Customizable Handout

Your Next Step (5 min)

Skim the materials above and jot down your ideas for implementing this. Share with the rest of the group.

Key Points

  • Generate a list of library champions (departments or individuals), lab groups, and open science groups. Solicit interest by sending an outreach message to them using the above template.
  • Reflect on the appropriate medium for your chosen audience. Decide if you will use the slides, handout, or another teaching aid to deliver your open science team agreements lesson.