Team:BGU Israel/Outreach

For many people, new media, including websites, blogs, and social networks, has become a major source of information about the world. Its unique advantage over forms of traditional media is that it enables a direct dialog between the public and the source, in which people can express their positions freely. It can also make information accessible to a wider range of people, who are not involved in the field or who don’t read traditional news sources. For researchers, new media is an important tool to enable a complex issue, such as synthetic biology, to become accessible for the general public.

During the past months, we addressed the public through a wide range of channels, including:

1. A number of blogs and podcasts.
   
   
   
   
2. We opened a Youtube channel featuring a whiteboard animation explaining our project and a number of other videos of our group at various events.


3. Our official Facebook page received more than 3,000 likes and has reached over 200,000 people from over 20 different countries. The page has allowed us to directly interact with people and answer their concerns and questions, and we have received hundreds of messages and comments on Facebook.
   
   Our personal favorite was a message from a fourteen year old girl: ”Science has been my biggest dream since I was a child. You have inspired me to believe I can fulfill this dream one day.” She heard about the project through a popular Facebook page called ”Tweeting Statuses”, which posted a goofy picture of the team with a caption explaining our project, and got around 3,400 likes and over 600 shares the day it was posted.


4. We also launched a crowd-funding campaign, in which we introduced synthetic biology and asked for help from the public to raise the last of the needed funds to participate in the competition. The campaign was very successful, raising 171% of our initial goal.

Despite the recent rise of new media, conventional media still has enormous influence in education and creating a public debate.
In general, stories in newspapers, TV programs, and news websites have a longer, more informative format, and we took advantage of all three for our human practice campaign.
Moreover, traditional media reaches segments of the population who are not necessarily active on Facebook or other new media sources.

1. A feature story about our project and the iGEM competition was broadcasted on Israel's national television, and we also appeared on a morning show on Channel 2, Israel’s most viewed channel.


2. We were also interviewed on Israel's national radio and in the South’s regional radio.
   
   
   
   
3. One of Israel’s biggest economic news sources, the Calcalist, published a printed as well as digital article about the project and the iGEM competition.


4. We also appeared in Israel’s biggest science news website – Hayadaan and in the synthetic biology website GetSynBio.


5. The climax of the campaign was when the project appeared in a two-page spread in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s most popular printed newspaper, and a version of the article appeared in the homepage of its online counterpart, the most popular news website in Israel, Ynet News.