[MUSIC] In this session, we're going to talk about communication and evaluation, and also large scale projects like Being Human. And we're very happy to have Michael Eades from the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. He's the Public Engagement Manager and Research Fellow. So thanks a lot Michael for being here. >> My pleasure. >> And I'm really keen to hear about the different projects that you manage and initiate. So can you tell us a bit about Being Human Festival and some of your other activities? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Being Human Festival is a big nationwide festival of the humanities, but specifically geared really towards public engagement, community participation. It's basically really about taking academic research in the humanities and making it meaningful to communities locally. So kind of finding points of connection with people's lives, and interests, and things that they do every day. So rather than being a festival that has a lot of public lectures, or public talks, or anything like that, it's really much more focused on two way interaction. And actually getting people involved in maybe even kind of co-producing some of the events and activities, but certainly participating in them in quite and involved and engaged way. It takes place every year, it's free. And activities can really be anything from quite small events, so kind of tea and talk, or walking tours, or library lights or things like that. Right up to be good larger scale projects that might involve art commissions and installations, and things like that. >> Thank you. And how do you get people to translate academic research into something engaging that actually people, a nonspecialist can enjoy? How does that process take place? >> I guess, yeah, there are many different ways of doing that, I think. And that's a point that I think is always really, really important to emphasize about public engagement. Generally, is that there are just many different ways you can approach that whole issue. I think really what unifies all of them is it's really about how the project is designed from the start. And it's about thinking really carefully about who it is that you want to be reaching and engaging with. And kind of taking everything from that point. So thinking about what interests those people? Where they might go as part of their normal life? And just trying to shape whatever it is you're doing as much as possible to their kind of interests and their comfort zone rather than yours. [LAUGH] And I think maybe some of the best and most successful projects are actually the ones where people have gone out and spoken to their intended audience first. [LAUGH] Or a really, really early stage in the project development and just basically allowed them to be good critical friends. And actually listen to their feedback about, is this a good idea or not? And yeah, there are often the best events really, most of our events, really, their audiences are generated locally. And I mean that's actually a positive, really, I think we put quite a lot of work into getting people to realize that it really is part of the job of putting on an activity that you have to think about how you're going to reach the audience. And our role role really is more about the kind of celebrating the festival as a whole and promoting that which involves a fair amount of work with the media, particularly with radio. Some work with kind of print journalism, a lot of social media. And I think that social media plays an interesting role both in kind of helping promote the festival, but also kind of building up a network really. And a bit of a community around the festival, which is kind of important part of what we're doing. because people don't just look at Twitter and scramble ever for event promotion, but they kind of talk to one As well, so it's something that helps a bit make it a bit more interactive. >> So if you had to give advice to group doing some kind of public history project, with respect to communicating and social media and all of that, what would you tell them? >> I would advise people really to kind of start small and work upwards rather than rather than try to go necessarily straight for kind of big media options. He's or anything like that, I mean, I think certainly social media has a kind of a role to play, but it's not necessarily the best forum for kind of getting people along to an event. I would say that if you're promoting an event, what you want to do is basically tell people about it, and that could mean just something as simple as putting up a poster in the right place or putting out some flyers in the right place. Not everyone these old and social media, not everyone is on every single platform in social media, so Twitter for example, is actually one of the smaller kind of social media platforms, and it's maybe not used so much by like people of certain generations and things like that so. Again, really it's kind of coming back to that key point of who is your audience and where are they going to be and where are they looking, because for some things you might be much better off having a small article in like a local paper than having front page of the Guardian or you might be better getting something under local radio station that people are going to be listening to at work or in taxes or whatever. I mean, local media typically tend to like things that are kind of quirky local interest stories so anything where it's like. I mean, the absolute kind of Pinnacle of local media would be something like the discovery of Richard the third under the car park in Leicester, right? But you're not going to get something as big as that, but anything that sheds and you kind of angle on a local environment, I think local media tend to be quite receptive to so hidden histories, untold stories about places. Or kind of maybe events and activities, so they would typically either be interested in the kind of underpinning research behind an event activity, so that's your kind of I've discovered this horde of coins in an attic, or I've discovered a sort of untold story of a murder trial or something that happened here a couple of 100 years ago or like something like that, so something very locally relevant. Or on the other side, they might be interested in the kind of innovativeness of the project itself, so somebody doing a very cool an unusual event, maybe using a local venue or something like that. But I think the key thing to remember always with any kind of news is well they want a story and they want it to be something new, that's why it's called news. >> Can you tell me some of the highlights of last year's first of all? >> That's a good question. An yeah, there was a really, really good event actually in Wolverhampton where they basically was called the Black Country unseen, and so the Black Country is the kind of area of the country that includes Wolverhampton and Dudley and places like that. And it's a slightly kind of under celebrated part of the UK, in some ways and they did a whole series of things really, but one of the main things that it was a kind of a multi site walking tour so you went around different areas an on the kind of Tour of the Black Country basically and at each stage there were kind of activities so one stop there was kind of poetry and creative writing. Another they were kind of sensory smell, taste, experiments and things like that. Actually, as you went around this kind of quite kind of quite amazing, kind of different side to the local area emerged and it was a really nice kind of place space project that I went to it and they had. Kind of really, really engaged audience of people going around. It was really, really good. >> What kind of events don't work as well in your opinion? And if you were to advise people against doing something, what would it be? >> I think that the biggest kind of Achilles heel for people is over ambition. Taking on too much, thinking too big. And trying to kind of deliver a stage at the Glastonbury Festival on the budget for a kind of garden fate. [LAUGH] In some ways, kind of overthinking things and over complicating things is another one. So, trying to cram too much content into a session or not thinking, I guess, how to make things very, very clear and understandable. And again we were talking earlier about actually trying out your ideas. Events that don't have a rehearsal sometimes, they're also the ones that kind of fall a bit flat. Big thing that we have is just very simple things like titles being too long and not understandable, containing language that is undecipherable to the intended audience. So yeah, those are sort of typical general points where things can start to go a bit off the rails, I think. >> How important you think fun is as a way of translating a history or research on history into something that an audience consumes? >> I think it's very important. [LAUGH] I'm not necessarily saying that every single public engagement activity has to be super fun, because there are other ways of doing things. But I think it's probably the best and easiest way to do public engagement is the think of something that is kind of fundamentally joyful. [LAUGH] >> Thanks very much to Michael who gave us many good examples of communicating, developing good ideas, and engaging with various audiences. And also using the evaluation of those projects to think for the future of how to do better things and how to kind of focus on what works really well. Thanks a lot and- >> Thank you. >> It's been really interesting. >> Cheers. [LAUGH] [MUSIC]
