Campaign for Science and Engineering
THE CHALLENGE
The Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) believes that the UK should celebrate and invest in research and development (R&D). But without the public feeling the same way, R&D investment is unlikely to be a political priority.
CaSE’s Discovery Decade project is all about connecting the UK R&D community to new public supporters. But before they could jump into a national public campaign, they needed to work out a way of turning complex R&D successes into compelling stories that would bring broader public audiences on side.
They asked First Create The Media and our design partner agency Luna9 to translate their extensive audience research data into messaging and narratives that could be put to the test and then used as the basis for effective future campaigns.
OUR APPROACH
We worked with CaSE’s research agency, Public First, to interpret the results of a nationally representative survey of 10,000 people, teasing out ideas for the best concepts and language to use to talk about R&D.
The language, messages and narrative structures we crafted were tested using focus groups and surveys to see which resonated the most across differing demographics.
After synthesising the results, we wrote a toolkit explaining how to talk about R&D with the public, including ready-to-use messages and tips on how to have trustworthy conversations. CaSE used this toolkit as the basis for their guide for engaging the public.
We also helped CaSE move forward thanks to our strategic ‘What’s next?’ advice for the Discovery Decade’s advisory board so they could decide how to move towards a national campaign. As a next step, the Research Develop Thrive campaign is now well under way across the R&D sector.
WHAT THEY SAID
“We were delighted to work with FCTM on our Discovery Decade project. Working with lots of public opinion data, we valued their ability to identify the key trends and shape that into a practical set of Comms tools. The team combine deep expertise with boundless energy, which helped drive our work forward.”
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