The 15th to the 17th of May saw the first meeting of the GetaMoveOn network fellows for our
Visibility Media workshop.

We all met on Wednesday evening, along with network leaders Anna Cox and Ann Blandford and got to know each other from various academic disciplines and from all around the UK! (You can learn about all of us at: getamoveon.ac.uk/fellowship/meet-our-fellows). The thing that connects us all is an interest in getting active with technology, we even managed to have an active lunch break on Thursday walking about Bloomsbury, needless to say we all had a lot to talk about.

The next day we started our workshop led by science writer and all-round star Helen Pilcher and Radio producer and tagline extraordinaire Toby Murcott. The morning was spent learning more about each other and our research, and learning to boil that down to our "golden nuggets" the one sentence tagline to showcase what our research is about and why people should be interested to find out more.

Fellows discussing how to improve our research visibility (credit Marion H A Lean @Maristotle)

We finished the first day making some short videos overviewing our research. In pairs we helped each other boil down the narrative of our research, to highlight the three key points we would want our audience to take away.

The next day we were joined by science presenter Greg Foot to chat about how we can interact with social media as researchers. We practised re-focusing our research topics to different audiences, for example, what would a 9 year want to learn about physical activity technology versus a group of twenty-somethings at a science communication event?

This brought us back to the key points to consider in any outreach :
Who?
Who is your audience - changes all the time. What will they ask what do they want to know?

Why?
Why is the audience there? They are interested and want to be entertained

What?
What am I going to say?

We also filmed the footage for out GetaMoveOn fellow intro videos, where each of the fellows will introduce themselves, the research and the current challenges faced in getting people active with technology (soon to be unveiled on getamoveon.ac.uk). We then talked about the best ways to make yourself approachable by the media and how to interact with them so both sides get the most out of it. After a final Q&A with Helen and Greg, we wrapped up and headed home to work on our new intro videos.

Overall it was a great experience, both meeting and learning about all the fellows work and also exploring how to keep what we think is really cool about our research while also making it understandable to a general audience. Our next meeting will be this month at the GetaMoveOn "Fast Track Impact" workshop on the 12th of June and I am looking forward to seeing the other fellows again to talk more active tech! And keep an eye on https://getamoveon.ac.uk to see our new videos and future posts from all our fellows!

Joseph Newbold, Research Fellow, UCL