Communications

The 7 Keys to Maximizing Email Survey Response Rates

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour / 1 Comment

Lessons learned after achieving a high email survey response rate for a recent NSF Grant Study on UCSF Profiles.  Brought to you by Anirvan Chatterjee & Nooshin Latour

Your recipients don’t care about your email

The average office worker may get over 100 emails per day. Swiftly deleting or ignoring unwanted email can be the only way to stay afloat. These seven best practices will help ensure your email gets opened, read, and acted on — and not ignored or deleted.

We believe that our email marketing tactics and using customized data to drive up survey responses is widely applicable across research studies that can utilize targeted user data to increase study participation. Continue reading →

SEO for Research Networking: How to boost Profiles/VIVO traffic by an order of magnitude

/ Anirvan Chatterjee

"Redwoods" by Michael Balint (cc-by)

The UCSF Profiles team has increased site usage by over an order of magnitude since the site’s big campus-wide launch in 2010. This “growth hacking” cheat sheet distills the key lessons learned during that period, and can be applied to almost any research networking platform, including VIVO, Profiles, and home-grown solutions. Continue reading →

2013 CTSI Retreat: Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 3

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

A few distinct themes emerged from #CTSI2013 tweets during the two lively panel sessions at the 7th Annual CTSI Retreat:

Themes from the 2nd Panel:
(UCSF Leaders addressed how ‘Big Tent’ proposed initiatives align with/and complement UCSF strategies)
-“Speed Dating” to promote networking among research scientists
-Big Data at UCSF & beyond
-Other ‘Big Tent’ proposal topics

Find below curated tweets by themes.

See Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 1 for visualizations and retreat tweets from ‘Setting the Stage’
& Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 2 for tweets during the first panel with industry and academic leaders.

2nd Panel: UCSF Leadership Perspective with Deans from all Five Schools

“Speed Dating” for Scientists – To Drive Novel Translational Research Connections

Big Data at UCSF?

Continue reading →

2013 CTSI Retreat: Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 2

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

A few distinct themes emerged from #CTSI2013 tweets during the two lively panel sessions at the 7th Annual CTSI Retreat:

Themes from the 1st Panel:
-Getting out of research and academic silos
-Community & #CitizenScience
-Industry Innovation, Entrepreneurship & Academia
-CTSA Consortium, National Issues

Find below curated tweets by themes.

See Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 1 for visualizations and retreat tweets from ‘Setting the Stage’
& Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 3 for tweets during the second panel with UCSF Leadership.

1st Panel: Leveraging CTSI, UCSF and CTSA consortium to radically transform research

Getting out of the Silo

Community & #CitizenScience

Continue reading →

2013 CTSI Retreat: Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 1

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

The 7th Annual CTSI Retreat focused on a selection of 10 open proposals among 23 offered through The Big Tent: CTSI 2016 NIH Renewal Proposal Launchpad.

Attendees and external audiences joined the conversation online via #CTSI2013. A steady flow of tweets came in throughout the day from 27 unique contributors (up from 16 last year) who shared insights, thought-provoking questions and engaged with one another (99,085 impacts!).

See Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 2 & Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 3 for themes that emerged from #CTSI2013  tweets during the two panel sessions.

Ready & Raring: #CTSI2013 Retreat

2016-2021: Opportunities & Challenges w/ CTSI Director Clay Johnston

Continue onto Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 2 & Big Twitter at The Big Tent, Part 3. 

Healthy Communities Data Summit

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

The Healthy Communities Data Summit held at UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus, organized by Health 2.0, the Foundation for Healthcare Innovation and sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation, attracted a mix of civic leaders, medical/health professionals, academics, hackers and communicators – all eager to gain a better understanding and share the innovative uses of open health data.

Key topics from the event included cooperation and trust building between government, community and enterprise players, along with high impact applications by making health data accessible to the public (See tweets below).

As a communicator, I took a particular interest in the “A Better Pie Chart & Beyond: The Evolution of Visualization & Analysis” panel. Wess Grubbs, founder of Pitch Interactive, emphasized the human element behind all this data, and reminded users to prioritize the narrative when communicating health data. Although data is lifted from its silos and becomes easily accessible through visualizations, it should tell a complete story – not just grab for views, or “instant gratification.”

Here’s an event summary from the California HealthCare Foundation’s California Healthline.

CTSA 2013 Annual Face to Face: The Power of Storytelling

/ Nooshin Navidi Latour

Hosted by: University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Center (HSC) in cooperation with UNM’s Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC)

This year’s Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) communications key function committee (CKFC) Annual Face to Face  focused on the critical role of storytelling to lift research of out its silos to a wider audience.

Richard Larson, MD, PhD, UNM HSC Vice Chancellor for Research compared communicators to ambassadors of information – after all, “research ignored is research wasted.”

Purpose/Objectives of the Annual F2F:

  • Increase understanding and support of NCATS and NIH priorities
  • Improve awareness of CTSA value, dissemination of key information, and collaboration among key stakeholders across the consortium
  • Inspire CKFC members through new connections, skill building, clear direction, and storytelling

Here’s a selection of tweets by CTSA communicators during the two-day conference:

Continue reading →

Interesting & cool! Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon – NYTimes.com

/ leslieyuan

Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon – NYTimes.com.

 

Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

 
 
For deaf students, this game of scientific Password has long been the daily classroom and laboratory experience. Words like “organism” and “photosynthesis” — to say nothing of more obscure and harder-to-spell terms — have no single widely accepted equivalent in sign language. This means that deaf students and their teachers and interpreters must improvise, making it that much harder for the students to excel in science and pursue careers in it.

ImpactStory: Telling Data-Driven Stories About Research Impact

/ Katja Reuter

ImpactStory is the relaunched version of total-impact. Don’t miss the post by @jasonpriem and Heather Piwowar, published on the Impact of Social Science blog. They describe some of the highlights:

To use ImpactStory, start by pointing it to the scholarly products you’ve made: articles from Google Scholar Profiles, software on GitHub, presentations on SlideShare, and datasets on Dryad (and we’ve got more importers on the way).

Then we search over a dozen Web APIs to learn where your stuff is making an impact. Instead of the Wall Of Numbers, we categorize your impacts along two dimensions: audience (scholars or the public) and type of engagement with research (view, discuss, save, cite, and recommend).

In each dimension, we figure your percentile score compared to a baseline; in the case of articles, the baseline is “articles indexed in Web of Science that year.” If your 2009 paper has 17 Mendeley readers, for example, that puts you in the 87th-98th percentile of all WoS-indexed articles published in 2009 (we report percentiles as a range expressing the 95% confidence interval). Since it’s above the 75th percentile, we also give it a “highly saved by scholars” badge. Scanning the badges helps you get a sense of your collection’s overall strengths, while also letting  you easily spot success stories.