Most events run by amateurs are “amateur” because they fall down on details. They have a great idea, or a great speaker, but the event turns out mediocre because the sound system doesn’t work or because there’s no parking nearby. It’s more fun to focus on the big stuff, but getting the little stuff wrong will kill you just as dead as getting the big stuff wrong.

Now, it might seem like you need a lot of money to pull off professional logistics, but you can make up for a lot by investing time and effort in the details. Take A/V as an example. It helps to have the cash to pay experienced A/V people, but you can ensure things go smoothly by communicating with presenters well in advance about their tech requirements, arranging enough time for a thorough tech check before the audience arrives, setting up a simple back-up system, etc.

The best piece of advice I can give is to imagine your way through the event, blow-by-blow, examining each potential failure point and eliminating it if possible. For example: I was once helping organise an event with 3 performances and a party on a boat. To prepare for this complex event with extremely tight constraints, we worked our way through the day, taking detailed notes on actions, and circling back as necessary:

• First, we arrive at the boat to set up. How early can we arrive? We should check that with the boat operator. It should be at least 4 hours early. OK, X will check on that.
• Wait, what needs to be picked up before we go to the boat? How long will that take?
• OK, once we arrive at the boat, what should be set up first? Where will the performances be? What furniture is needed? What needs to be plugged in? How many plugs will we need? Do we need extension cords? How many? How long? What if you’re missing a piece of equipment?
• What if it rains? What if people are late? What if…..

We did this for several hours, weeding out problem and problem.

Next, imagine the event from the perspective of your different stakeholders. What will it be like for your presenter? Will they have rushed to the event from somewhere else? Are they likely to be hungry? If so, have some fruit or granola bars on hand. What about your sponsors? What do they want to get out of the event? This might lead you to remember that your closing remarks should include a special thank you for their support, or remind you that you need to plan a hanging mechanism for their banner.

One of the best ways to learn to do this is with someone else – preferably someone experienced. Get them to ask you critical questions.

And if you ever catch yourself using the words “I assume” then you have to stop right there and ask yourself what happens if the opposite of X happens. I learned this from the producer for a large festival, who drove me crazy by doing that again and again…. but it was the right thing to do. It’s especially useful in bringing out conflicts over who’s doing what when. For example, at a meeting:

Producer: Who’s picking up the speakers at the airport?
Jen: I assume that would be our shuttle as usual.
Producer: You assume? Who else has plans for the shuttle?
Other person: I’ve already booked it to be on call for the exhibition….
Jen: Uhhh…. right. I guess I’m booking some cars for the speakers….

After your event’s over, if you can’t see flaws in the execution then you are probably deluding yourself.

Rule 2: Spend an hour on promotion for each new attendee

This sounds insane, but it’s not.

It applies most when:

• Your event is new or changing. Well-established, successful events often have their own promotional momentum through word-of-mouth.
• You don’t have much cash to promote your event. If you can’t buy ads, you’re relying on friends, colleagues, social media and mailing lists. Suppose you want to promote your event on several mailing lists. For each one you have to find the right contact and craft an email for them, then respond to follow-up queries, often asking for specific formats. Most people won’t send your email out, so if you do this 10 times you might get your message on 3 mailing lists. Response rates are pretty low for such mail-outs. So, that’s an hour’s work for between 0 and a few people.
• Your event is unusual and needs explanation so that people “get” it. This means you have to tailor your messages for different recipients. “Film festival” is a concept people get across most societal and cultural boundaries. “Unconference” is not.

It’s not as important if:

• Your event caters directly to a well-defined group of people. “Well-defined” means you can communicate with them through a small number of effective avenues (e.g., their professional association).
• You’re offering something free that people normally pay for. “Free beer” does not require one hour per person.

Promotion is one of the most striking areas of delusion. First, people overestimate how well-known their organization is, how instantly interesting their event will be to large groups of people, how easy it is to understand, how good their promotional materials are. As a result they do way less promotion than is necessary.

Second, people tend to amazingly overestimate the number of people who actually show up. This is so prevalent it can cause serious disadvantages to people who report honestly. Very common: “the room holds 300, and it looked pretty full, so I’d guess there were 250 people there”. In fact, rooms look “pretty full” at 1/3 to 1/2 capacity. You have to actually count.

Third, it’s tempting to assume that the audience that comes is the one you want. But it’s rarely the case. For example, “public” lectures run at universities often have healthy attendance, but if you look at who’s actually attending, it is often mostly academics from other departments rather than people from outside the university. If the goal is to reach outside, people from inside shouldn’t count towards your attendance. You can easily make a very rough assessment of the audience demographics by (1) estimating the range of ages, genders, job-types, and so forth; and (2) by talking to random audience members before or after.

So:

• Track the hours you spend on promotion, the number of emails you send, etc.
• Set up a registration site, even for a free event. The conversion between registrations and attendances can vary a lot, but if 0 people sign up, you’ll know you have a problem.
• Accurately measure your actual attendance and estimate the demographics that are relevant to your goal.

Rule 3: Every compromise lowers quality

Insidious compromises arise from conflicts of interest. You’re putting on a lecture about genetics. A university is providing the venue. They want you to feature their top geneticist, but your first choice is the founder of a local bio-tech start-up. You have a conflict between your desire to have the best speaker and your desire to appease your benefactor.

People succumb to these pressures way more than they think because they are usually subtle and easy to argue away: “Now I think of it, it’s better to have an academic rather than a business person because it’s more relevant to students.” I know that I have succumbed often, and I suspect there are even more instances that I don’t know about.

Other sources of such pressures include colleagues who want you to show their work, your own desire to include your friends, and unexamined assumptions (“such and such is famous, so he must be good”). Issues to watch for include anything to do with prestige, money, seniority, fairness (“it wouldn’t be fair to show X’s work without featuring Y’s work too”). Keywords to watch for are “ought” or “should”. You only say things like “we really should include such and such” when you’re reluctant for some reason. Often the reason is that you unconsciously realise that this is not in the best interests of your goal.

Don’t underestimate the importance of this. Anything that causes you to include certain people or topics for reasons that are not directly related to your goal will damage your event, even though each individual compromise may seem small. The best events are run by people who monomaniacally focus on their goal, and fight tooth and nail against anything that takes away from it.

Here’s some things that help guard against these problems:

• Be clear on the goal. If it’s a reading series to promote a publisher’s authors, fine. If it’s to bring the best writers to town, that’s different, and the two shouldn’t be mixed up, even if the publisher is paying.
• Be clear with the people who pay. They have the right to know what you’re offering them, and what you’re not. This helps you stay aware, too. The best idea is to be creative in finding mutual benefits. For example, a public lecture series I ran guaranteed a certain percentage of speakers would be from the university that was paying for it. I could do this while presenting the best speakers possible, because I knew that a fraction of the best people I could afford to bring would in fact be from the university.
• Cultivate a prickly attitude to content suggestions from people who have agendas. It doesn’t make you popular, but it helps bring the subtle, insidious pressures out in the open.
• If you have to capitulate, be extremely clear with yourself about the fact that you did so, and why. Tell your family or friends about it or write it in your diary. Cement it into a story so that you know exactly how it happened, and don’t delude yourself out of the recollection later.

Metarule for execution: Stop deluding yourself

You have to be insanely optimistic to start something big or new or creative. But when it comes to the execution, you have to be your own harshest critic. You have to shift from assuming difficulties can be overcome, to assuming everything will go wrong. You have to stop being excited about what’s good about your plan, and focus on how to fix what’s bad about it. That’s the only way you’ll pull off something that validates the insane optimism you started with.

——-

This is the first in a series where I will be asking various people to share their 3 rules for doing something that they do well. This “3 Rules for X” heuristic was developed in conversation with Hassan Masum and Michael Nielsen, and formed the basis for a session Michael and I held at Sci Foo Camp in July 2010.

Most so-called science outreach is really just promotion. This is appalling.

We’ve all encountered this: the science communication department at a large university is usually devoted to marketing the research of that particular university. The so-called “outreach” products of such departments – the public talks, articles, and events for school groups – are all forced to suit this purpose. Mediocre research is described in glowing terms as “world-class” or “ground-breaking”. Poor communicators are put forward again and again so that they can be seen as a leader in their field.

This is promotion, not outreach. Describing this as educating about science is like saying that a car commercial is designed to teach viewers about engine design.

This is not to say that it’s wrong to do promotion in order to get support from granting agencies and donors. The problem is that this is confused with science outreach.

By outreach I mean activities whose primary goal is to enable people to learn about science, to talk about science, or to do science.

Imagine if your high school english teacher had decided to make your class read his or her amateurish novel rather than Shakespeare. You might have learned something, but it would be dishonest of your teacher to have claimed that you were engaging with great literature.

Promoting mediocre research as “cutting-edge” fundamental science to people who have engaged with the university in good faith, expecting an opportunity to learn, is just as harmful and dishonest. And yet this is just what happens all the time in the science communication departments of many universities.

Of course, many people in such departments end up there because they want to do outreach, and they manage to fit some in around the edges of the promotional material. This helps, but it doesn’t solve the basic problem.

So, what’s the solution? It’s very simple: outreach should be in a separate department to promotion and marketing, and it must be evaluated along different metrics. While the goals for promotion may be described in terms of the number of visits to the website or improvements to the university’s public image, the only goals for outreach should be things like the number of people who have participated and evidence for changes in their understanding of science.

These metrics explain why little science outreach is done at universities: there is no obvious pay-off in terms of funding or enrolments, so why bother? In fact, universities should dedicate a certain amount of money to community outreach, just like most large companies do. When a bank sponsors a sporting team, it’s not because the sport showcases their newest mortgage.

Similarly, universities should engage in sponsoring genuine science outreach events, without interfering to ensure that their researchers are featured. The pay-off is the positive feelings the sponsorship inspires, the media coverage, and the opportunity to brand the university as a community supporter.

I’ve decided to start publishing a series of short interviews with people doing interesting work in science outreach, with a new interview published each Monday. My goal is to build up a vision of the range of career paths people follow to end up in science outreach, and the different sorts of work that they do once they’re there.

Our first interview is with Eva Amsen, a PhD candidate in Biochemistry and science writer. Enjoy!

How did you get interested in science?

I don’t really know. I recall reading about genetics in a kids’ magazine when I was seven or eight, but I didn’t know it was “science” at the time. I could see that it was something educational, but didn’tistinguish between learning about science or learning about history. When I was a teenager I became concerned about the environment, and I enjoyed school science projects about air or water pollution. When I had to apply for university, I applied to a Chemistry program with the intention of studying Environmental Sciences and using science to save the planet, but during my first year I realized that Environmental Chemistry was mostly Analytical Chemistry and I didn’t really like that field, so I ended up in Biochemistry instead. I’ve always had any interests beside science, so it’s hard to figure out what led me to science.

What makes doing science outreach seem worthwhile to you?

There are different kinds of science outreach: One type of outreach is aimed at elementary and high school students to get them interested in a career in science. Another type is aimed at people who don’t work in science and never will work in science but who are curious about the world and like hearing about science. That is my favourite kind of outreach, because to a certain extent everybody *is* interested in science. People will say that they don’t like science, but what they don’t like is the memory of sitting in a science classroom in high school. Once you point out that there is science involved in many of he things they read about in the news every day – alternative fuels, stem cell therapy, forensics – it suddenly becomes interesting and you have an eager audience wanting to learn more about DNA fingerprinting or energy conversion.

What comes to mind as one of the more interesting things happening in the outreach world today?

One of the things I find really interesting is the concept of Cafe Scientifique. It brings back a time when science was discussed more publicly than we’re used to now. Rather than only hearing about science through the media, people can attend a Cafe Scientifique meeting and talk directly with scientists. It’s interesting for the participating scientists as well: They get to meet people who are interested in their work but don’t know enough about it to discuss it at an academic level. From my own experience of doing outreach for kids I always felt re-energized and more excited about my own work after having talked to a group of curious nine-year-olds. They have such an admiration for science, and you just tend to take it for
granted if you’re in the lab all day. It must be the same for the scientists who get to talk on a Cafe Scientifique panel.

What are you currently up to?

I’m trying to finish my thesis, so I can leave the lab and focus on science writing for a while. I’m finding it hard to combine thesis writing with other writing, so my blog is not updated as often right now, but I have some blog ideas for when the thesis is done. The only non-blog, non-thesis writing I’ve recently done is for CRAM science. It’s a Canadian website meant for teenagers, explaining the science behind everyday concepts. My most recent piece for CRAM was about fake tanners and I’m currently writing an article for them, together with my sister, about dehydration. I’ll also be at the Science in the 21st Century conference, where I’m moderating a panel discussion about science and the public on September 8.

Our second in this series of interviews with people who do science outreach, this time with Joel Gilmore, science communicator at the University of Queensland.

How did you get interested in science?

I’ve always been fascinated by how things work and uncovering the underlying principles – whether it be physics or lockpicking! What really set me on my course to physics, however, was picking up a popular science book for $2 at the Brisbane “Ekka” (a cross between a fair and a produce/cattle display!) called “The Edge of Science” about cosmology and particle physics. It was a great read and actually went into quite a bit of detail, and I was totally hooked. At the age of 12, I was proudly telling everyone who asked I wanted to be an astrophysicist!

What makes doing outreach seem worthwhile to you?

Well, first and foremost, I love it – I enjoy the challenge of explaining a complex topic to people who may not have a scientific background. And I think most audiences can handle far more science than many communicators give them credit for. Ultimately, though, I think it’s vital that everyone has some basic understanding of modern science and the new technologies that are appearing. Whether they’re potential scientists who will one work on these projects, or whether they’re politicians who will one day (hopefully) fund them, it’s a great feeling when audiences nod with understanding at the end of a talk. Plus, if I can put even one reiki practitioner or magnetic healing “therapist” out of business, I’ll count my life as well spent.

What comes to mind as one of the more interesting things happening in the outreach world today?

Tricky! I think one of the best things are the many blogs run by scientists around the world. Not only are they great sources of first hand information for increasingly tech-savvy audiences, by they also give insight into what has traditionally been quite a mysterious world: academia! Combined with tech sites like Slashdot.org and online podcasts like Australia’s The Science Show, the internet is helping communicators to reach more people more easily.

What are you currently up to?

I’m currently employed by the University of Queensland as a science communicator. A big chunk of my day is running the Physics Demo Troupe which travels out to schools around
Australia doing science shows, talks and workshops. I just got back from a month of travel from the outback mining town of Mt Isa to the beautiful Thursday Island in the Torres Straits, and it was immensely encouraging to see so many enthusiastic physics students.

I also help coordinate a public lecture series called BrisScience – founded by none other than Jen Dodd when she was at UQ! I also write physics parodies and run a blog when I get time!

After a few weeks of hiatus on the blogging, we’re back with the third in the series of science outreach interviews. This week it’s a pleasure to hear from Chad Orzel, a blogger, author, and physicist at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

(P.S.: If you enjoy the interview, you might like to go help him in his blog’s DonorsChoose campaign for raising money for high schools.)

How did you get into science?

Depends on what you mean by “get into science.”

I quite literally can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in science. My grandmother tells a story about taking me to work with her once when I was about four, and having one of her co-workers ask what I wanted to be when I grew up. I replied “I’m going to be a paleontologist” (or, in one version, a “vertebrate paleontologist,” just to be extra clear).

Exactly which science I was interested in changed from time to time growing up, but I was always interested in some sort of science. I latched onto physics in my junior year of high school, when I took physics (out of the usual order, for reasons that escape me), and saw all the cool toys that my teacher got to play with. I went to college being pretty sure I was going to major in physics, and stuck with it.

I really enjoyed being a physics major at a small liberal arts college, especially because it gave me the opportunity to get involved in research very early on, starting the summer after my first year. It seemed to me that my professors had a pretty sweet job, so I went to graduate school with the goal of getting a Ph.D. and ending up teaching physics at a small liberal arts college, and I was lucky enough to manage that.

I can’t really say I’ve fulfilled my childhood dream (I’m not, after all, a vertebrate paleontologist), save in the very general sense of becoming a professional scientist, but I have ended up pretty much exactly where I wanted to be when I graduated college, which is pretty cool.

You have written a book about quantum mechanics and you have been blogging about physics for many years. What motivates you to put so much effort into these projects?

In the case of the book, I’ve been paid a substantial sum of money. That never hurts…

The book came from the blog, though, and I was writing about physics on the Internet well before people started paying me. I started the blog because I was a big reader of blogs already in 2001, and I like to hear myself talk. I started talking about physics on the blog because it’s an area where I have actual knowledge to share, as opposed to just running my mouth about things I don’t really understand (which is not to say I don’t do that, too, but I like to have a little credibility…).

I keep doing it because when it goes well, it’s a real kick. It’s the same thing as teaching a class, in some ways– when a lecture goes really well, and I can see a difficult idea really “click” with a class, that’s a huge kick. It makes the occasional drudgery involved in the job seem insignificant.

The same sort of thing happens with the blog. When I find some novel way of explaining a difficult idea, and manage to do a good job of getting across the excitement and wonder of physics research, I find that really exhilarating. And knowing that hundreds or thousands of people read that explanation makes it even better.

The origin of the book project was completely surreal, but once I was convinced that it was a worthwhile idea, it was actually a lot of fun to write. In the first pass, at least– editing drafts down is always a world of pain. After a little fumbling around, though, the dog voice turned out to flow really easily, and I found it really helpful to the straight physics explanations to be able to use the dog to interrupt things when the going started to get a bit rough. It injects a little much-needed levity into what can otherwise be a pretty ponderous subject.

The book has ended up being both more and less work than I thought it would be. Polishing the text has been really annoying – it’s amazing how much I overuse the word “really” – but the actual writing went faster than I expected in a lot of places.

Do you do other outreach work, or have some ideas for the future that you’d like to share with us?

I floated the idea of an online “film festival” a while back, and discussions over how to make that happen have gotten bogged down a couple of times, but I still like the idea. I’ve been really impressed by the creativity and ingenuity people display on YouTube, and I think it would be really great if we could harness that to do something positive for science. I’m going to keep re-visiting that idea, and see what we can pull together.

I’m also signing up for things like the “Adopt-a-Physicist” program, and trying to do more to help local outreach efforts (the college chapter of the Society of Physics students has done demonstration days at local high schools, for example). I’m also trying to push the sort of outreach evangelism I was preaching in my talk at the Science21 meeting into new venues, with mixed success.

What do you think is one of the most interesting new things happening in science outreach?

I think the broadening of communications options has really done a lot to expand the audience – and the potential audience – for science content. When I was a kid, the only place you could really find science programming was on PBS, maybe two or three nights a week. Now, I’ve got a half-dozen channels on my cable tv that carry science (or at least science-ish) programs every night. ScienceBlogs has an audience of millions, and there’s a respectable number of other sites bringing science to the web.

I’m also really encouraged by things like the Science Cafe phenomenon and the success of the World Science Festival in New York this past May. I think that, contrary to a lot of the siege mentality you hear from science bloggers, it’s actually a great time to be a scientist, and that a larger fraction of the public than we realize is willing and eager to hear about science, if we make the effort to reach out to them.

This week’s interview is with Damian Pope, senior manager of scientific outreach at Perimeter Institute, and an old colleague and friend of mine.

How did you get interested in science?

Even back in primary school I really liked math – I was relatively good at it and got good marks. I found it fun and satisfying because there were orderly patterns that you could use to solve problems just like puzzles. I think a lot of my interest in science grew out of that. For example, in grade 11, we studied trigonometric identities. You’d have these horrible mathematical expressions, but if you knew the identities you could simplify it down to something simple. I loved that.

Of course, I also love to read, I love to think – how could anyone not be interested in science?

But I had never had a science or physics teacher that I could describe as good – certainly no teachers in the inspiring style of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. So it wasn’t until university that I got interested in physics. In first year, I read “In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat” by John Gribbin. That was cool. Physics became interesting because it was more alive.

What makes doing outreach seem worthwhile to you?

I feel that I can do some small amount of good because I know a bit about science, but most people don’t. Especially with physics, people can be overwhelmed if they try to find out about it. And yet, I find that often when I talk to people about things like quantum physics and darkmatter, they really like it. But they don’t get to learn about it in school – they just learn about blocks sliding down frictionless planes and so on, which is boring. So I sometimes think of myself as being a physics translator.

I also love the dimension of interacting with people, especially the psychology of how to get and engage people’s attention.

What comes to mind as one of the more interesting things happening in the outreach world today?

One thing that I’m really interested in is how internet-based technologies have opened up all sorts of possibilities for interaction. For example, take the recent webcast from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. An amazing experience the other side of the world, and we can get it for free! Another example from the LHC: the LHC discussion group on Facebook, where I have found this community with similar interests to me. I find that very exciting.

More generally I find it very exciting when people are looking at really creative ways to do outreach, such as a play about physics, or a physics-based video game. An interesting example of science outreach is “Through Einstein’s Eyes” – a freely available series of videos showing what the world would look like if the speed of light was only a few meters per second.

Finally, I think it’s really interesting that outreach is becoming a more mature field. It used to be very isolated – pockets of people doing it in their spare time – but now it’s coming to be recognised as a profession.

What are you currently up to?

Following on from the Mystery of Dark Matter (a PI Explorations video), I’m working on making a video for high school kids on quantum physcis. It will be a short video about half an hour long that will open the door to the mysteries of “inner space”. I’m focusing on this because quantum is such a hugely important topic in modern physics, but it’s taught poorly at high school level because there aren’t good resources available. This isn’t surprising, because it’s such a tough, abstract topic.

My goal is to create something immensely useful to teachers and students and to really make quantum physics accessible. I want to put it in its rightful place, instead of having it seen as a sort of add-on – this post-Newton crazy stuff – I want to show how it is central to modern physics.