Strategic Plan

At the time the RERAD Strategy was written, there were a number of concerns about the extent and overall effectiveness of communication between the scientific community and other stakeholder groups, including policy teams in Scottish Government and related agencies. The RERAD Strategy therefore specifies that the research teams should transfer and exchange knowledge with a much wider set of stakeholder and audience groups than had previously been the norm. This wider KT/E remit provides a number of challenges in terms of building capacities both within the research teams themselves, and between the research teams and the various stakeholder and audience groups.

This KT/E strategy is therefore founded upon the answers to five key questions:

• Who are the key audiences for the research?
• What are the principal purposes of communicating with them (e.g. raise awareness, change attitudes, influence behaviours etc.)?
• What are the most appropriate routes (communication channels) for achieving these (e.g. media campaigns, popular articles, stakeholder consultative groups etc.)?
• Who has prime responsibility for facilitating these activities?
• How can the effectiveness of these activities or outputs be measured?

This strategic plan identifies the main audience and stakeholder groups in relation to this programme of research. These are: policy, public, commercial, scientists and programme specific stakeholders. The Table below provides the overall strategic planning framework for KT/E activities relative to these key groups. The table addresses the five key questions set out earlier and identifies: the principal purposes of the KT/E activities; the main communication routes and the people with prime responsibilities for facilitating these; the main types of activities and outputs, and the measures used to measure and assess the effectiveness of these activities.

Goals

The KT/E strategy has five overall goals:

1. To develop more effective engagement with all the key stakeholder and audience groups for this research programme.
2. To improve the quality of scientific communications and related outputs provided to these groups.
3. To increase the overall level of impact of the research findings in relation to these groups.
4. To achieve increases in both the use and impacts of research findings in policy support.
5. To improve the capacity of the research teams to evaluate and learn from KT/E activities.

Environment – Land Use and Rural Stewardship Research Programme KT/E Strategy 2006 – 11 : Audiences, Outputs and Measures of Effectiveness