Learn about the work of EMBL's Communications team
After a relaxing end-of-year break, the digital team is back in Heidelberg and raring to get started on our many projects. This week we built a dashboard to help us to keep track of the scope, status and dependencies of our nearly two-dozen projects. Continue reading “Introducing the Digital Projects Dashboard”
In our communications for EMBL, we have traditionally highlighted what EMBL does: research, training, services and so on. As I have said before, what EMBL does in each of these areas is not unique in the life sciences. Efforts to describe what we do as unique will therefore rely on things that are difficult to substantiate such as, “EMBL strives for excellence” or “the EMBL spirit is unique”. I’m not saying that these things are not true, but they are not tangible and they are difficult to describe and justify. So what tangible thing or things might we use to differentiate and position EMBL? Continue reading “Doing and enabling”
I want to take a look back at my first full year as EMBL’s social media manager. So what worked best over 2017 and what can I learn from this?
My basic goals for EMBL’s social media are to build community and develop a shared understanding of who we as an organisation are. Consequently, I care about what resonates on the different social sites much more than driving traffic back to EMBL websites, although traffic is obviously a by-product. Continue reading “EMBL’s top social media posts of 2017 and what we learned from them”
In this post I share an outline of what I have learned about EMBL’s followers on social media. This is based on my observations and research, as well as third-party data about social media users in general.
Social media users are generally young, well educated and well off, even compared to average internet users. The gap in social media use between people aged 18-34 and those aged 50 and older is significant in every country surveyed. The percentage of people who use social media differs from country to country, as does which social media channels people use (Source: Pew).
Let’s look at each of our channels and see what we can say about our audiences.
Continue reading “Who are we reaching on Social Media?”
During EMBL’s 43 years it has grown in size, scope and geography. Today EMBL has six sites, many activity areas and focuses on five related but distinct missions.
There is a very strong unifying concept at the core of EMBL. However, during those years of growth a solid conceptual view of how websites, brochures and newsletter relate to each other has not yet been forged and adapted holistically.
Today, products vary in look, format and feel — some of that is for very practical reasons and some reasons are largely attributable to entropy.
Continue reading “Mapping brand structure to support communication”
The design sprint that started a couple of weeks ago began with the team describing their visions, their ideas, and thoughts of what a new EMBL corporate design could look and feel like. Central to describing and understanding why something looks the way it does are our design principles.
Many organisations have design principles to guide their work. They are often described as ‘the star to sail your ship by’; a set of common beliefs and guidelines for a project, product, organisation, or initiative. Some of my favourites are documented here.
Here is our first draft of a set of principles that came out of the last two weeks working together. This is just the start. As per principle #2, we’re showing this as early as we can so we can get feedback and iterate.
Continue reading “Our Design Principles”
Sometimes it takes someone to ask the right question to arrive at an important piece of information. And often these questions are asked by new people, who challenge the assumptions you take for granted about the place where you work. Shortly after Dan and I started working together to lead strategy and communications he asked me what I thought was special about EMBL. Like most other people that he had asked before, I struggled to distill the gist of what EMBL is down to one sentence. But he continued asking and after several rounds of ‘I don’t buy it’ and ‘you don’t get it’, we arrived at something we both thought was a very powerful concept. EMBL is an incubator. It recruits the very best scientists worldwide and gives them almost complete freedom and the conditions to do something great … after they left EMBL.
Continue reading “Start up life science”