Insights

Resolved: There is no communication tactic that has more strategic potential for your organization or your personal brand than publishing a regular email newsletter. 

Snicker. How old-fashioned. But hear me out, and then email back if you disagree.

I was looking with a client at the numbers for his fledgling monthly newsletter — just two issues old.…

On its 50th anniversary, the Urban Institute has issued a remarkable statement on how structural racism has shaped its research agenda and practices over those 50 years — even to the present day — and how it is moving specifically to address that racism.…

“Everyone” is not an audience: the first platitude of communications.

An important variation on this “everyone” theme: “x, y, z, and anyone else who….”

Effective research communication requires making choices — immediately — about who your audiences are, and then understanding which messages and products will give them exactly what they need to make a decision.…

Bethany Brookshire of Science News provides the best overview I’ve seen of the drive to end “statistical significance” as a way to judge the results of scientific experiments and studies.

If you’ve missed this development, you should use Brookshire’s piece to catch up.…

In response to my thoughts yesterday on KPIs and organizational fear, list member Tom Miller (founder of Email for Experts) responds (reprinted with permission):

I really think the leading/lagging KPI distinction matters a ton. If leading indicators are under you/your team’s control, it’s something you can all be held accountable to without the baggage of potential failure attached… you either do the work or you don’t.

…then we need to start with “you’re afraid” and go from there.

I’ve seen organizational leaderships doing everything they can not to set key performance indicators for their communications.

I’ve seen leaderships setting absurdly easy-to-achieve KPIs.

And I’ve seen leaderships (and funding officers) who treat missing a KPI as occasion for a Zero Dark Thirty interrogation.…

I’m starting a research project to look at three questions:

1. How are research-driven organizations using thought leadership content that draws on the expertise of their researchers or other subject-matter experts?
2. How do these organizations measure (or how would they like to measure) the value of that content, either for the organization or the researcher?

Here’s a really big problem:

The world’s progress over the past 11 years on closing workplace gender gaps for seniority and salary has been glacially slow — so slow that we’re not on track to achieve parity for another 200 years.…

I recently reread “Prof, no one is reading you,”​ a 2015 opinion piece in The Straits Times by the academics Asit K. Biswas and Julian Kirchherr.

You might have seen it when it first came out. It broke social. (But as anyone in the real world will quickly point out, that’s far from breaking reality.)

Still, “Prof, no one is reading you” is not only still relevant.…

Science Twitter lost it a bit on Wednesday, because some Twitterites were insufficiently awestruck by the new photos of the black hole:

And even if you responded with the required enthusiasm, that just reminded at least one famous scientist of how we’re letting Science down elsewhere:

The universe is amazing.…