Award-Winning Advice on Research Outreach
The following is republished from the Network for Business Sustainability. View the original article written by Chelsea Hicks-Webster here.
Research is meant to be used.
That belief is the foundation of the ONE-SIM Outreach Award, which recognizes researchers who’ve done an excellent job reaching non-academic audiences. The award is a joint initiative of two divisions of the Academy of Management – Organizations and the Natural Environment and Social Issues in Management – in partnership with the Network for Business Sustainability and the Rotterdam School of Management.
In this article, you’ll meet the 2024 award winner and runner up, and get their advice for making your own outreach more effective.
Meet the 2024 award winners
Award winner: Montgomery, A. W., Lyon, T. P., & Barg, J. (2023). No end in sight? A greenwash review and research agenda. Organization & Environment, 37(2).
This review paper offers academic insights to help put an end to corporate greenwashing. Authors won this award because of their strategic and effective outreach efforts, which led to extensive media coverage, policy discussions, and public engagement.
Runner up: Slager, R., Chuah, K., Gond, J. P., Furnari, S., & Homanen, M. (2023). Tailor-to-target: Configuring collaborative shareholder engagements on climate change. Management Science, 69(12).
This mixed methods paper identifies best practices for collaborative shareholder engagements on climate issues—that’s when investors work together to convince a company to take climate action. Authors were honoured as runners up for this award because of their comprehensive outreach strategy, which included ongoing involvement with practitioners throughout the research process. Practitioner engagement enabled knowledge co-creation and improved the study’s relevance and impact.
Below, each research team offers advice for academics wanting to have more impact with their research.
Award-winning advice for research outreach
Advice from 2024 award winners
Based on an interview with Wren Montgomery and Tom Lyon.
Play to current events
Researchers were inspired to do this work because of important trends they were seeing in business practice. “In 2015, we wrote a review paper about greenwashing. But by 2023, we realized the world of greenwashing had completely changed,” said Lyon. The authors were seeing a new phenomenon, where companies were committing to achieve net zero by 2050, but their commitments were impossible to verify. They wanted to bring academic insight to a topic they knew was important, and needed to be on the world’s radar.
Involve your communications team early
Montgomery, Lyon, and Barg work at schools with active marketing and communications teams. Often, university communications staff only hear about research once it’s already complete—then, they have to find ways to mobilize it. These authors took a different approach. They consulted communications staff as they were writing up their paper. “Our internal communications supporters thought that ‘greenwashing 3.0’ and ‘future washing’ would be sexy, and we would get traction with that,” said Montgomery. This allowed the researchers to use language directly in their research paper that would resonate with their target audience.
Package your research accessibly
Once the paper was through the peer review process, university marketing and communications staff helped to organize the ideas into a visually pleasing electronic flipbook. The accessible format made the content more approachable for non-academic audiences. The researchers and university staff then shared the flipbook through existing communication channels, including with journalists, in newsletters, and on social media. The flipbook “really took off with marketers, managers, exec ed offices, and it went from there,” said Montgomery.
Create a website
Not all schools have a well-resourced communication team to help with outreach. But that doesn’t have to stop you from making your work accessible. In addition to working with university supports, the authors also created a simple website (GreenwashAction.com). “[This allowed us to] bring together all of the research and media we had gotten and make it easily accessible,” said Lyon.
Stay true to your research
“Journalists are often trying to get a debate going,” laughed Montgomery. “They want two sides.” As the authors were talking to journalists, they were careful to stay grounded firmly in their research findings. For example, Montgomery recounts an interview with reporters at a major newspaper: “[I was careful to say] ‘According to my 2015 definition of greenwash, this would be greenwashing,’ as opposed to saying, ‘I believe this is greenwashing.’”
Keep it short
“When talking to journalists, it pays to be really succinct,” said Lyon. Enough said.
Montgomery and Lyon also share some advice in this short video:
Advice from 2024 Runner Ups
Based on an interview with Kevin Chuah and Jean-Pascal Gond.
Start with a user need
Usually, academics do research, get it peer reviewed, then think about outreach. That’s not a great approach if you care about impact. How can you be sure about what potential users are struggling with? How do you know they need the insights you produced?
Chuah and Gond’s paper was addressing practical needs from the start. The research was motivated and funded by a United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) call for proposals. PRI knew investors needed help engaging companies on climate action, so they found researchers who could help them identify best practices.
Engage practice from start to finish
Practitioner engagement was baked into the entire lifecycle of this project. Authors conducted 86 interviews, and then involved investors in interpreting data, too. This continuous engagement had many benefits for outreach:
Ensure relevance: When end users guide your research, the output will inherently be more useful to them. In this case, investors told researchers that they wanted to know what didn’t work, as well as what did. That enabled the researchers to emphasize the attributes of both successful and unsuccessful shareholder engagements, helping investors understand what to avoid.
Generate excitement: When you involve practitioners in the research process, they will feel more excited by and receptive to your findings. “Once our research was done, it was really easy to get back to those practitioners who had helped us,” said Gond.
Reach cold audiences effectively: By working alongside practitioners throughout the research process, you learn what they care about and how they talk about their needs. That knowledge also helps you communicate your work effective to cold audiences once the research is done. “When we finished and we were ready to disseminate, we knew what people would find interesting,” said Chuah.
Choose the right partners
Not all partners are equal. Working with a large, well-funded, and highly connected organization (like PRI) has lots of benefits. PRI was able to give researchers access to a lot of archival data and practitioner interviews. PRI was also highly motivated to distribute research findings to its large networks of investors. “Most topics have a platform, like PRI,” said Chuah. “That platform will already have a network of engaged target audience.”
Engagement invites engagement
One thing that surprised the researchers was how their work with PRI resulted in an influx of invitations to share their findings with new audiences. “Some members of PRI contacted us in order to have presentations at their own investment firm so they could understand how to appropriate our results,” said Gond. The researchers were also invited to speak on podcasts and write guest blogs.
Consider mixed methods
In this paper, researchers used both quantitative and qualitative methods. They believe this mixed method approach allowed them to appeal to a wider audience. “Some practitioners really want the quantitative data and statistics,” said Chuah. “But others really need the stories from other practitioners.”
Chuah and Gond also share some advice in this short video:
About the ONE-SIM Outreach Award
The ONE-SIM Outreach Award is sponsored by the Academy of Management’s Organizations and the Natural Environment (ONE) and Social Issues in Management (SIM) Divisions, with support from the Network for Business Sustainability and Rotterdam School of Management. The award is given annually and the deadline is April 30 each year. Find out about past winners and consider applying!