 Hello, good afternoon and welcome. I hope that you are enjoying the event so far. It's great to have you here in the room with us. Big thank you to Resolution Foundation for hosting this event and for bringing us all together. I'm Candice McKenzie from the Institute for Government. I'll be chairing this session on communications and events and I am delighted to be joined by Emily Fiddy, Communications Officer at Trust for London, Josh Tapper, Communications Officer at Demos and Margaret Welsh, Communications Officer at New Economics Foundation. We will start this session by spending a few minutes letting you know what each must do in our roles and then we're going to Q&A. If you wish to ask a question you are very welcome to start submitting them straight away using the Q&A box or if you'd like to say your question you can do so by using the raise your hand tool. For this option once I call out your name our technicians will unmute you and then you'll be able to speak to us. After the session an FAQ sheet will be shared so if we don't get to your question hopefully it will be picked up in there. So as I mentioned I work for the Institute for Government, a think tank that provides research, analysis, topical commentary and events to explore the key challenges facing government. I work in the events department as a producer. We produce two to three events per week including virtual round tables and public events. There are three of us in the team and we each have a speciality so my speciality is podcast and special audio productions which I do alongside our online broadcast events. So prior to joining the Institute I organised events and did marketing for record labels so I worked for Warner Music, Atlantic Records and Defective Records and I'm also a DJ and radio centre and producer so communicating through audio is a big passion of mine. My role at the Institute for Government has a lot of varieties no two days are ever the same so alongside the production work some of my other tasks include creating and sending invites and managing the event registrations, meeting with researchers to discuss their upcoming events, liaising with speakers, participating in an event and conducting an event test with them, creating the weekly events newsletter for our mailing list and producing monthly analytics for on our podcast performance. And one of the things that I enjoy about working for the Institute for Government and there are many things but one of the main things especially most recently is the professional development support. So over the years and I've been at the Institute for almost 10 years now I have had many opportunities to continue learning and developing my skills through internal and external courses and training and as job requirements and situations have changed my role has been able to adjust and adapt. So I first joined the Institute as an events and comms assistant and as our events output grew especially our work with external clients I then became an events officer and one of my key roles then was to manage our external client portfolio. Now with the pandemic locked down and working from home my role has transformed once again and I'm now an events and podcast producer. So digital production has been a lifelong passion of mine from working as a DJ and also an enrager so to have the opportunity to incorporate my personal passion with my professional role and to take on new challenges and responsibilities has been an exciting, entertaining and very rewarding experience for me. So I'm going to leave it there for now and I look forward to your questions and now I'm going to hand over to Emily. Thank you so much. Yeah hi I'm Emily I'm the communications officer at Trust for London and so if you haven't heard of us with the Trust for London is actually a charitable foundation and so it's a little bit different to maybe some of the speakers that you've heard today from the wide think tank sector but the reason why I am speaking here is because we often fund think tank research and so as a charity foundation we give out about 300 grants a year all looking to tackle poverty and inequality in London and we fund community groups and voluntary sector in London on the front line but we also fund research and policy work that many think tanks are doing so that could be for example the IPPR we funded them to produce a report on the immigration system and the changes that Brexit was bringing provide recommendations for making that easier or something like the police foundation for example the UK is leading police think tank looking into the gig economy and crime that gig economy workers were facing so my role as the communications officer is extremely varied in that because no two days of the same similar to what Kennedy was saying and sometimes yeah so basically we worked very closely with think tanks to amplify their messages and ensure that that message is getting out there to the wider sector and myself we might also help support think tanks if their coms team might not be as strong or as full so for example with the police foundation report that was funded recently I helped to produce like a social video so with their key messages of what their report was saying and the key recommendations to share on Twitter and it was just another way of how we combined to ensure that those messages got out there to our audiences so in my day-to-day job I will run our social media accounts and I'll put together our newsletter I'll check in with grantees and see whether there's any opportunities that are coming up that we could perhaps like write a blog post to promote their work and one of the things that Trust for London does quite well I think is bringing different groups together so for example we might notice that there's like some policy recommendations in a think tank report that we then can pass across to another grantee working in that field and making sure that all of those messages sort of come together to make the most impact in terms of any coms and social change so I really enjoy my job I think it's brilliant before this I actually worked in the charity sector so I started my career in a graduate program called Charity Works which is to help people get into the charity sector and get a year's long placement and it's a brilliant way to like make that first step and then I moved across into coms from there basically and I'm really happy that I'm at Trust for London it's a lovely organization to work for and I just love the variation of my role I think it's brilliant and being able to make some sort of social change and also have like such a broad scope of what we're working on and who we work with is brilliant and in terms of how my role has shifted a bit since Covid I just wanted to mention it's obviously quite difficult to meet people in the sector in the same way because you don't go to events or if you do go to an event it's like this and it's like the panelists on one side and people on the other and so what I really liked about what Resolution Foundation have done recently is like bringing together people who work in think tanks to like speak and converse like informally and have a chat about you know like we had a little chat about like anecdotes of stuff that's happened in Covid and it's just a really good example of like how the sector is like using different ways to like bring people together and still you know like get to know each other and work closely and yeah so I think it's brilliant sector to work in and I couldn't recommend it enough really so thanks looking forward to your questions. Thank you Emily and speaking of questions just to remind you that if you wish to submit your question you can use the Q&A box or the raise your hand tool okay now we're going to hear from Josh over to you. Hello everyone and thank you very much for having me at this really great event and great idea and my name is Josh Tapper and I lead press and communications at the think tank DEMOS and if you haven't heard of DEMOS and DEMOS is a cross-party thinking tank and it works on a number of areas of public policy from the world of work to the future of the internet and a couple of our flagship projects at the moment are Renew Normal which is looking at what life after Covid should look like and how we can engage citizens to shape that future to build back better and a good the good web project which is which is looking at how we can build a good web and what a good internet looks like and so my job is to manage report launches when we bring out and research reports and I'll pitch it to media press journalists and lead our social media content behind that too day to day I continue that engagement with the media filled spokespeople for interviews and pitch opinion pieces and as I said run our social media accounts I work within the wider external affairs team which focuses on the communications but also events design and also part partly parliamentary engagement and fundraising which is shared between the external affairs team and also the research team and so my background before Demos I actually took quite an unconventional route before before coming to Demos and I didn't go to university and about a year after I finished my A-levels I started an apprenticeship and the government communication service and based in the cabinet office in number 10 and then after my apprenticeship I worked I continued working government for a bit and then shortly after a couple of years ago I arrived at Demos and so sure I sweet and I guess look forward to I look forward to the question. Thank you so much Josh and last but by no means least we're going to hear from Margaret. Hi everyone thanks so much for having me my name's Margaret Welsh and I'm a communications officer as well at the New Economics Foundation which is also known as NEF for anyone that doesn't know NEF is a progressive economics think tank that works to transform the economy so that it works for people and the planet. We do this through policy and research but also through organising and movement building and supporting on-the-ground projects in local economies. We work on a range of areas including the climate crisis and the Green New Deal, social housing, improving the private rented sector, local economic development, social care, moving towards a shorter working week and the welfare and benefits system. I'm one of two comms officers at NEF and my job is quite broad. I work on a range of different things but most of it involves working with our research staff to get our work the attention that it deserves so this can include producing digital content for social media, editing and producing reports, approaching journalists and editors to get our work in the press and producing our in-house podcast. I've got a particular interest in environmental research and policy so I get to lead some of the framing and narrative work we do for our environment and climate work. A bit about me, I've been at NEF for three years now. I started working there after a few years of working in various roles in the charity sector. Not all of them were comms related including our global witness which is an anti-corruption charity and at the Royal Geographical Society which is a member's organisation and academic institution. I did a master's degree but it's quite unrelated to the work that I'm doing right now. It was in cultural studies at SOAS in London and before that I studied sustainable development at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. So yeah I'm happy to answer any questions about like my career path because it's been in the charity sector but not specifically think tanky and not particularly economic. Yeah that's pretty much everything. My role has not changed a huge amount during the pandemic to be honest because NEF already had quite a flexible work from home policy so we were always quite used to working remotely. I think like a lot of people it's been interpersonally quite difficult. It's like a lot easier to have misunderstandings with your colleagues when you can't just pop around to their desk but compared to a lot of people I know in other industries it's remained essentially the same aside for people in my organisation who have to put on events and stuff and have had to pivot to doing online events. But in terms of our work we've been like demos working to design policy to do with how we want the economy to look when we emerge from the pandemic and pushing for the government to build back better. So yeah that's everything about me. I look forward to having some of your questions. Thank you so much Margaret and we have already had some questions submitted so I'm going to dive straight in. So the first one is from Cara, Cara Peters thank you for your questions. So she asks do you have any recommendations for resources we should explore to try and gain experience. So Emily I will come to you first with that one. Sure the first thing that springs to mind for me which I've used throughout my career and was recommended to me by the Careers Office at my university actually is if you're particularly interested in the third sector as in the wider charity sector but also think tank opportunities there's a Facebook group which I love which is called the third sector PR and comms network and not only is it a really good resource in terms of just like finding like looking for like recommendations of like training courses that you can go on or like people sharing like inspiring campaigns and things like that. There's also like a jobs post which I know so many people and our organisation posts on those are that share job opportunities in the sector and I would totally recommend joining that group it's open to anybody who's interested in that field. Yeah that's quite a specific example but I would totally recommend that and then look forward to hearing what the others say as well. Great and how about you Josh what would you say? I would actually completely echo Emily and say that the same Facebook group I'm a parcel of and I find that incredibly incredibly useful. Also I mean again I mean it's not great for now but when you know things remotely get back to normal I mean turning up to you know going to think tank events and when you can there's you know in real life when things you know go back remotely and relatively back to normal that's a really good way to speak to people speak to people that work at think tanks get to know the work they're doing ask for any help and if they need any help particular things and hopefully you can kind of not only gather gain opportunities from that but also gain experience of the type of policy areas that think tanks are working on gain you know knowledge of those areas and then that will hopefully help you build up naturally your your knowledge of comms in the think tank world and but yeah I mean but again I echo what Emily says I mean there's some great stuff online on social media on Facebook and you can find some really really useful tools. Great thank you Josh and what about you Margaret? Yeah I think yeah I agree about think tank events and I think especially now actually even though you can't go to events in person it's almost easier to go to online events because you don't have to work it around whether you've got a free evening or anything like that like normally they're quite accessible and generally think tanks will have a series of public events that they'll put on. I think in addition to that the only other thing I'd like to add is just sort of keeping track of of what they're up to like through social media or normally think tanks will have a newsletter that you can subscribe to and so if you just find a selection that you think are interesting and that you think work on stuff that that that you think that you would like to work on subscribing to a newsletter and just reading some of their materials so that you're familiar with it can be really useful. Thank you Margaret and I just want to add a way of also getting experience especially in this situation that we're right now where we're all just at home especially with like online experiences that you can actually just reach out to people and volunteer to volunteer to help them so for example at IFG we now use a software called Restream to do a lot of our live events and when we first move to this platform actually one of my personal friends uses it for their work so I just ask them can I help with your broadcast just so I can get some I suppose extra experience on the software and that also just helped me accelerate to then be able to do my work at IFG so thank you Carl for that question we've had quite a few more coming but before I move on just quickly I think it was Emily can you just repeat the name of the Facebook group because somebody in the chat just missed it. Sure of course it's the third sector PR and comms network and I'm sure we can also share it a link to it as well if necessary afterwards. Great thank you Emily so another question has come in from Sol Hallam, I hope I've pronounced your surname correctly and Sol's just asking are there any technical skills that you think are valuable for working in communications for a think tank if I could go to you Margaret first please. Yeah sure so I think that comms is quite a broad skill set so some roles won't require you to do all of these things but off the top of my head some things that I found useful when I was applying for the job that I have now is that I had experience using video editing software which meant that I could produce digital content for social media quite quickly my colleague is very good using in design and photoshop but other things can also be things like mailchimp because often you're the person who's sending out newsletters and emails to your to your like subscribers and members and stuff like that and I think also just a general familiarity with like the major social media platforms and sort of the different functionalities that they have is really good. Thank you so much Margaret and how about you Emily? Yeah I completely agree with what you just said that for we recently were advertising a comms intern role at the Trust and one of the things that we really looked for in applications was a passion as well like just in terms of being able to demonstrate where you have either like volunteered in a particular position or have built up skills that way I definitely recommend if that's doable doing that as well. We also I noticed there was a question about lived experience as well for at the Trust we're really keen to ensure that there's good representation and people have lived experience of poverty and inequality in some way to be able to communicate it and so yeah we actually looked for that in applications as well so if you're happy sharing that sort of thing then if an application does say then do include that but obviously only if you're comfortable with doing so but yeah I'd also say and especially right now if there's any like specific if you're very interested in like web for example like looking around potentially doing like SEO training or like if you're very interested in doing like in expanding on a specific and like digital skills that's what I recommend because that's what I've recently done training for and it was really interesting and useful anyway so yeah I hope that helps. Thank you and Josh. Hi and I'm just wearing quite a type of time so I'll try and keep this short and sweet and I completely agree with what everyone else has said and we're in terms of technical skills and yeah digital stuff is really useful and being able to do design using design do video editing software but I'd also just build and I know the question was about technical skills but I also think a big thing about coms and it is a broad skillset and a lot of it is about soft skills and about being personable and getting on with people and having an eye for a good media story and also you're the bridge essentially between the complex policy and the public often and being able to digest that and turn that into something and much more simplified and something which makes a lot more sense to to the average person is I think one of the most important things. Thank you so much Josh and just because of the sake of time because I've just looked and seen that there's only three minutes to the next session I'm I mean it was covered great by my fellow panelists so I just echo what everyone has said we really don't want you to be late for your next sessions we do start at 5.40 so session 4a will cover a day in the life of the researcher and session 4b will cover the role of membership organizations both sessions will be recorded so you'll be able to catch up on the one that you miss just like to say we very much hope that you enjoyed this session and hearing about communications and events at a think tank thank you so much to my fellow panelists for joining and a huge thank you to you for joining us in this room thank you