Seeing Science’s Communication Problem
Scientific organizations work at the cutting edge. Their research is elegant and purposeful, creating innovations that are the closest thing to miraculous in our material world.
But there’s a massive gap between how most scientific organizations conduct science and how they communicate. That’s a major problem.
The consequences ripple through every level of the typical scientific enterprise:
The researchers who discover a link between tuberculosis and cardiovascular disease, only for their discoveries to disappear under the mountain of literature.
The communications team that struggles to stay on top of what and when their research teams are publishing.
Research executives who don’t see what tangible value their communications work is delivering–or even could deliver.
The consequences don’t stop there. They ripple out across society, creating an environment less and less conducive to the scientific enterprise:
The legislator who passes a note to his colleague while the scientist is speaking—“I don’t know what she’s saying! You?”—days before they decide how much funding the government’s going to invest in research.
The lawyer or blogger or podcast host who equates science and pseudoscience, casting doubt on the whole scientific enterprise.
For at least 40 years, major reports have been calling attention to these kinds of problems, yet no one has offered a real solution. Instead, for all this time the gold standard for communication has remained the corporate public relations model.
But here’s the thing: that corporate communications model was never designed to suit the scientific community’s unique needs, characteristics, or role in the world. In 2010, for example, a National Academy of Arts and Sciences report warned that this “Madison Avenue” approach held a “dim chance” of restoring public trust in science.
Yes, more recent efforts to improve science communication have moved us in the right direction. Explaining science for laypeople, telling human stories–these are invaluable tactics. But they’re tactics. In business-speak, they’re not a strategy–and they’re not an end-to-end solution.
But that’s exactly what the scientific community needs: an end-to-end solution that can pinpoint their best insights from across whole organizations, share them with the right people in the right way at the right time, and then build the relationships and understanding too.
It’s time to reimagine how scientific organizations communicate and then guide that transformation.
That’s why we founded Etalia.
We are the first company to offer an end-to-end communications solution that is purpose-built for the scientific community.
