What is this guidance supposed to achieve?
I offer free 30-minute conversations to researchers about how to promote their research, and within those conversations I often suggest that a personal website can be useful for publishing those ideas you find yourself explaining in conversations over and over again. They allow you to just give people a URL and let them read your points in a coherent essay, in the right order and as concisely as possible.
I have realised I should practice what I preach.
In this section of my website I attempt to lay out, in a clear and structured way, the advice I find myself frequently offering.
Why is this guide even necessary?
Researchers at higher education institutions already have systems for promoting their research and their careers: they publish papers in reputable peer-reviewed journals, and they travel to academic conferences to discuss their work and to professionally network.
This is still extremely effective – in fact, it is arguably the best approach. Sadly, it is no longer enough.
Being a researcher in the 21st century means working in a ferociously competitive market, and researchers who are able to do more to promote their work and their careers tend to be at a professional advantage. Some researchers are naturally good at it. Some learn how to do it by leveraging skills they learned through other interests, such as music or stand-up comedy. I think most struggle with it, and many would welcome some help.
First, a quick caveat
I have worked in communications, engagement and marketing since 2010 in many Oxford departments, but it is important to note that I do not have an academic background myself. I have never been a researcher, or even a post-graduate. I have talked to many researchers about how to communicate their research, but I have not done this job myself.
So whilst I will give the best advice I can, researchers reading this guide may still find themselves disagreeing with a point I make, and thinking “I’m not sure he truly understands this from a researcher’s point of view”. If so, there is a good chance that they are correct, and I recommend they trust their judgement over mine!
How this guide is structured
These are the steps I recommend.
Too few people understand them, and for those that do it is something of a superpower.
Once you understand the basics, you should be ready for the next step.
In this section I review as many promotional tools and channels as I can think of.
A problem that I will write about at length is that, in the digital age, there are an almost infinite amount of promotional tools available to us. This can be overwhelming. Do you start a blog? Make TikTok videos? Organise in-person events? Which tools are worth investing your time in?
This is a landscape that is constantly shifting so it is worth reassessing periodically. Everyone’s needs are slightly different, and tools that work for one researcher might not be as suited to another. However, in my conversations with researchers, there does seem to be a good deal of common ground here.
This is a process of asking yourself a number of questions, such as:
Who would you like to promote your research to? Who are you required to promote it to? What are the challenges you are likely to face when doing this?
The answers to these questions tend change over time, albeit slowly, so here too it is worth periodically coming back to re-evaluating them.
Once you are confident of your answers, you are ready for the final step.
Hopefully by this stage you should clearly understand:
- your goal,
- your constraints,
- the fundamentals of how to promote, and
- the channels best suited to your needs.
This should help you to create and implement your own strategy for promoting your research and your career.
