Happy New Year!

 

The New Year is here and you’re probably planning your science outreach efforts.  We are curious to know how you are planning to share the important benefits of science through your outreach efforts, to whom you will be reaching out, and why you think your approach will make a difference.

Here at Science Communication Journal Club we feel the first step in answering all these questions and achieving success, with anything, is to create a mission statement.   A thoughtfully written mission statement helps bring focus, clarity of purpose, and functions as a guide for building a road map towards successfully achieving one’s goals.   This is why we’ve decided to start the year by creating our own mission statement.

 

But, everything is more fun with friends

Since we are writing our own mission statement, we thought it’d be fun to turn this important activity into a fun challenge to help inspire the science community lay the foundation for a year of awesome science outreach. So, we created the State Your Mission Challenge.

 

Joining the State Your Mission challenge is easy!

Just craft your mission statement using the guidelines we share below and share it on Twitter, making sure to tag @scicomm_jc and include #scicommjc in your post.  We will choose the most concise and carefully crafted mission statement as winner.

What’s  the prize

The winning mission statement will be featured on our blog and our newsletter. In addition, the author of the best mission statement will be a guest of honor at one of our Twitter chats, where we will put all of our heads together and discuss effective strategies to make the mission a reality.

What’s the deadline?

Writing a good mission statement is like designing an experiment that works: it takes careful thought, patience and much iteration to get it right. It requires patience to craft something that clearly articulates the Who, What, How and Why of your science outreach efforts.  This is why we are giving you a month to craft and submit your entry. The deadline to submit your missions statement is February 7th.

How to create a mission statement

To create a mission statement for your science outreach efforts, start with answering these questions:

1- Who will be the focus of your outreach efforts?

Example: Elementary school science classes

2- How do you want to approach your audience?

Example: I will approach local science teachers for opportunities to visit science classrooms and tell stories about my research projects.

3- What specific outcome do you aim to achieve?

Example: I want children to get to know an actual living scientist and learn how science positively adds to their lives.

4- Why do you think your approach will have a positive impact on science communication?

Example: What happens in a school classroom, will not stay in the classroom.  By doing outreach in schools, not only children will be inspired and educated about the role of science and scientists in their lives, but they also carry this education to their homes, creating science awareness among their parents.

Carefully crafting answers to these questions will help not only to clarify the direction of your science communication plans, it will also determine the kind of training you seek, conferences you attend, and alliances you create.  These answers will also form the basis for crafting your mission statement.

Example mission statement: As an actual living scientist, I want to engage families in my community and educate them about the important role science plays in their everyday lives. I will visit local science classrooms and give presentations about my lab and research projects in a way that is fun and inspiring to young children.

We’ll show you ours, hope you show us yours.

Our mission at Scicommjc has always been clear in our heads, but we never took the time to put it into words as a formal statement.  We’ll be working right alongside you as we craft our mission statement for Scicommjc as well as our own personal goals. We will share what we create on Twitter, but we would love to see yours too!

Join our challenge and share how you are going to make your mission possible, how you are going to change the world.