 Okay, hi everyone, let's make a start, shall we? I think it's just under quarter two, so I think a few more people will see, join. But I hope everyone who's tuned in already is enjoying the event so far, and so thanks to the Resolution Foundation for finding a way to bring us all together like this. So in this session, we're going to be talking you through what it is like to work in communications and working with the media within a think tank. So my name is Simon Keane, I'm the media and communications manager for the Nuffield Trust and we're a health and care policy think tank. I'm joined here by Thomas Housechild, the communications manager for the Centre Progressive Policy, and we've also got Melissa here, the digital communications manager for the Institute for Government. We're going to each take a few minutes now to talk you through our respective roles and give you an overview of how our organisations communicate, our work, whether that's to the media, government or social media users. We will then open up the floor to you guys and we'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can within the 10 minutes. So if you guys can ask questions via the Q&A function, which I think is at the bottom of your screen, I can see we've already got one in there now, so I think you guys know how to use it. So yeah, the Q&A at the bottom screen rather than the chat function, please. You can also raise your electronic hand if you want to speak. After the session there'll be an FAQ circulated, so if we don't get your question, don't worry, hopefully they'll be picked up in there. So I'll jump in first and just give an overview of my role and then we'll come to Thomas and Melissa. So I'm a public relations graduate from Bournemouth University and from the southwest of England originally. Before coming into the think tank world, I worked in a couple of events companies. I've worked for PR agencies as well, so promoting health technology companies to kitchens at one point before moving into press office work in health. At the Neufield Trust I run the press office, which means I'm usually the first person journalist or television and radio producers end up speaking to if they want to work with us. The media are a really important stakeholder for the Neufield Trust, they're really important stakeholder for think tanks in general. They're a vital tool to reach a large audience and with good timing and broader appeal it can help to influence policymakers and too. And also I think our researchers love to see and hear themselves on television and on the radio. And I'm basically the person that gets the right people talking to each other so that we can get our work out to as many people as possible via the media. So through newspapers, through specialist magazines, through the radio, through television and online. Like other think tanks we have a broad range of experts, each have their own speciality. So we have an expert in workforce, an expert in social care for example. Part of my job is to brief them and to run mock interviews with them to make sure they feel supported and they feel able to talk about their work live on television and when they're questioned by journalists. I also write press releases and issue comments highlighting key findings from our work and explaining why those really matter to you to the readers and watch as a television and radio channels. So it's a good role, it's a great role I think in terms of where it sits in your version because not only do I get to work with communications colleagues who cover a range of stuff such as digital design publications. I also get to work with the researchers, get to work with the leadership team, so you get a really good oversight of everything going on inside the think tank. And it's a rewarding role as well because you see that research on television and radio and you can see the impact it's making and hopefully changing people's lives for the better. So we provide all sorts of works, briefings, reports. We've been doing a chart of a week series during the pandemic, we promote events as well so we're working on our online summit series which is coming up in the middle of March. So there's plenty of stuff to talk about and I think the trick is in any piece of research if you really boil it down there's something of interest in there for people like being new but the trick is finding that and then communicating it in the most clear way possible. So yeah now I think think tanks, communications is really valued in think tanks. I think think tanks are filled with different people. I think different perspectives and viewpoints are really important there's no point in knowing you're talking to people like yourselves and I think in terms of communications itself it's a very varied career and I've certainly had the chance within a smaller think tank to get stuck into different areas outside of my own media role and I've certainly found my experiences and other jobs to be helpful in doing that. So that's it for me so Thomas I'll hand over to you. Thanks very much Simon, I hope everyone can hear me clearly. Well I'm Thomas, I'm the communications manager at the Center for Progressive Policy. It's a rather small think tank, we are only around about 10 people and that's set up one about three years ago so we still in our startup or possibly called it scale up phase now. I've been previously at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the World Society of Arts. Before that I studied international relations and conflict resolution and before I went to uni I had a very different career. I spent a few years at a bank in Germany doing an apprenticeship and I must spend a few years in the German Navy so if you want to talk to anyone who drastically changed his career please do approach me. So the Center for Progressive Policy or CPP as we call it focuses on making inclusive order reality that focuses mostly on project or research areas like skills and health, local government finance and the role of business in society because all these factors are quite important if you want to empower as many people as possible to benefit to but also contribute from economic role. The biggest difference between us and large or more established think tanks is probably that we don't have a large const team. We are one and a half comms people to me full-time someone else part-time and the advantage is that in such a small team you really get your hands on everything you do and the media engagement be proactive or reactive and you do the website social media and you coordinate the report production, you work on more support stakeholder engagement and then you also support the events with marketing to get as many people in front of the stage from nowadays in front of the screen as possible and what's involved in the post-event marketing to disseminate our videos. So in large organizations you're probably more likely to find people who are specialized on certain areas whereas in the smaller ones you have more like a jack-of-all-trade who does a bit of everything. So as I mentioned I lead on the communications in our think tank which is basically all about getting our message out and as Simon just said connecting the people that do the research with the people who should know about the research there's not really a typical day for a comms manager in a think tank I would say. If you would ask me what my highlights are it's probably our report launches, my support the production or the coordination of the report production and do the media outreach, make sure the website and social media up to date and sometimes we have found events as well to accompany the report launch. That's probably the most exciting time, also the busiest time I have to say but it's truly rewarding if you get your message out there and you get attention by media or influential stakeholders and on other days I might do a wide range of things I might pitch blocks to the media to keep us in the conversation in between major publications or just to be part of a bigger debate and so for example we've just done quite a bit on the proposed council text increase then we try to be a voice in that debate. We think about how we respond to major announcements like the upcoming budget next week for example that's always a big thing for the think tank world. I respond to media inquiries and help to prepare team members, I write newsletters, I disseminate as I said already event invitations to get the right people in front of the screen or the stage. I support the marketing of events afterwards or we discuss public relations and met us so for example we talk about what kind of language we should use to engage with which parties when it's the best time to hold an event or report. That's pretty much me I would say my role in a nutshell. Great thanks very much Thomas. Melissa let's come over to you then. Yeah so hi everyone so I'm Melissa I'm the digital communications manager at the Institute of Government and so we're the leading think tank working on making government more effective and so I've been at the Institute of Government for about five years now but before that and so I did a degree in politics at the University of Southampton. I also worked in local and regional press so I actually did a national council for the training journalist course and that kind of helps me develop a lot of the skills that I actually use now and then eventually moved into press and communications roles and mostly in the university sector so I worked at Sussex University and also LSE and then eventually moved into the think tank world with IFG so when I saw that IFG was hiring for their comms team it seemed like a really good fit having done politics at the university and then the sort of work experience that I had. In terms of my role now it is very varied as I think Simon has said communications roles can be very varied and so I focus more on the sort of digital side of things and my role is probably more focused on content and content management and so our researchers produce excellent reports and they write comment pieces and explainers and so on and so my role is to kind of make sure that all that content is flowing through properly across all of our digital platforms so I manage our website and that can be anything from uploading content to editing, proofing, making sure that the copy is optimised for search engines because obviously we want to make sure that people can find our work and to also thinking about how we communicate work on the website, how we present things, the layout and you know is it accessible are people able to find what they're looking for and I also manage our social media channels so from Twitter to Instagram we haven't quite made it onto TikTok yet but you know writing tweets I work very closely with the researchers to think about best ways we can use social media to promote their reports for example, head of report launches, planning content on social media with an eye on what's going on in the news, I will also monitor discussions on social media you know if there's something quite topical that lots of people are talking about I will say to our research teams you know hey people are talking about I don't know civil service relocation perhaps we could do a tweet thread on this or you know if we've got existing content on that fishing that out across all of our platforms as well. One other aspect of my work as well is I suppose content design so I do a lot of things like producing videos and infographics data visualizations so I work very closely with our research teams on that I mean not everyone has time to sit and read a 70 page week report so I will work with the research teams to think about creative and visual ways that we can pull out some of the key messages in their research and perhaps distill it into something that's quite eye catching and will capture people's attention as well. In terms of other things that I do I work quite closely with our head of digital marketing to think about our audiences, who they are, what's the best way of engaging with them, how can we reach them and also work very closely with the events team and thinking about how we can promote our events and how we brand them how we live tweet obviously with the pandemic we've moved all of our events online so that means that we've got lots of great video and audio content from our events we have lots of brilliant speakers that come in so also thinking about what we can do with that after an event has taken place. I do a little bit on sort of general public relations handling press and media contacts and media bids and tracking when our researchers are on BBC news and things like that and I also get to work on quite a lot of long-term projects as well so thinking about how our processes work within the communications team and things like web redevelopment so yeah it's a very varied role it does mean that you're having to be across quite a lot of the detail across all the teams but it's also very rewarding you know there's something quite satisfying about you know as I think Simon said you know when you see like your researchers on on the news or in the media and things like that so yeah hopefully that gives a little bit of a flavour of what I do. Right thanks, thanks Melissa yeah what I think an IFG TikTok account would be would be a very popular TikTok account. I yeah it's striking to me that you know certainly Thomas you're doing a bit jack of all trades there small comms team, Melissa you're covering in bits of the media social media as well as the digital publication side as well and then you know a lot of those roles are familiar in my role as well so I look up to social media in our organisations as well so I think it just gives you in terms of communications you know coming into a communications job and entry level it's a really good career option because you can pick up different skills in different areas and you do get a chance to get involved in policy or events and then specialise your career as you go on so I'll try and get some of these questions in because we've only got about five minutes left of the session. There's a question here from from Ella which I think we can probably all answer quite quickly how sociable is your work in general? Are you working with a team or you sat alone behind a desk? I think for communications people this year has been a really tough one because we've all been I imagine you guys have been well I can see that we're all sat at home rather than our offices so it's a very sociable job and I view it as a very sociable job. You work across the team you're regularly talking with each other, you're regularly exchanging information I don't think there's any kind of part of my job that I could do without the rest of the team behind me. I don't know what do you think Melissa? I totally agree I think you know we are one of the teams in the organisation that I think we do have to work with everybody from you know people in ops to events to partnerships to all of the research teams and so it is a very sociable job and I suppose with working from home there is something that you know it can be quite difficult to kind of recreate that you know whereas when you're in an office environment but yeah it's definitely a sociable role and it's probably one of my favourite things as well is that I get to work so much with with all the teams across the organisation and to get to know what they're doing as well. And Thomas? Yes I totally agree with that I think as a comms person you are almost at the center of everything because you have to engage with everyone the research of the engagement the directors the ops team the events team and you sit almost well I wouldn't say I sit in the center but you're connected to everyone in the team and as soon as you finish working on one research project you move over to the next one so you have quite a lot of variety yeah so it's very sort of a yeah. Okay thank you both looking at the questions here from both Hugh and Matt that touch on the NCTJ journals and postgrad that you talked about Melissa how I mean obviously myself working in media I don't have that particular qualification I come in from the public relations point of view and also there's also lots of entry-level kind of communications jobs you can come into where you pick up skills for other people why don't you tell us a bit about the course Melissa and how you how helpful you think that's been or or whatever you think that there are other routes in as well. Yeah I think for me it was very helpful I initially had the idea of actually you know doing journalism as a career and so obviously it was useful for that in terms of building those kind of key foundational skills and yeah and a lot of that I still use now so when I did the course we did things like news writing which is obviously very useful if you're working in a press role where you're going to be writing press releases and it's also a great way of just getting a sense of how journalists work and and the ways in which they they reach out to sources and that sort of thing and you know I also had the chance to do things like type setting and layout and that can also be useful if you want to do more of a publications editor type role within a think tank and I wouldn't say it's the the be all and end all of you know I wouldn't say it's necessary to get into a communications role I mean I I feel it was a good stepping stone for me to get my first well I suppose it was an internship that I did that was my first sort of role in communications and press and it was so it was a good way of of moving into that and but I do think that I ended up learning a lot more on the job so I think having that real life experience and it's perhaps more important than as I said you don't necessarily need the NCTJ in order to to move into communications I think communications is something that you learn quite a lot on the job so I wouldn't worry too much about making sure you've got that specific qualification and Thomas just to wrap up you said you had quite a career change from from the Navy into communication so obviously how would you consider your sort of on the job training I think what helped me quite a lot is while I was at university I did a carol of internship to get this visual and I started off in project coordination and then communications role in the first thing I've worked and took it from there but I don't have any form of communications qualifications and I think most people who work in that field don't to be honest most people have probably a bit of a social science background and I'm sure it heads but I didn't feel that I needed it in my job because similar to what Melissa says it's a lot of learning by doing in the job thank you I think we're because the session is only 20 minutes long there is a 10 minutes sort of break in between this one and the next session so just before we wrap up I'll let you know that next two sessions are starting at quarter past five one's covering policy work and new opportunities outside of London and the second and the other session is covering communications and events and the links to those sessions have already been emailed over to participants all the sessions are recorded so you can watch any back that you haven't seen later on so yeah unfortunately we don't have time to address too many really good questions actually that have come through clearly we need more than 20 minutes daily to kind of talk about ourselves and all right but hopefully we've given you an insight into communications career into the into think tanks so it is it is a very very career very rewarding fast-paced lots of different things to get involved in very sociable so yeah I think there's certainly three of us would recommend it so with that I'll say thank you for joining us and enjoy the rest of the event