Invitation to Participate in the Digital Engagement and Innovation Programme
Project Inspire Invitation to Participate
Project Inspire Application Form
Programme Goals
All your proposed programme activities for The Digital Engagement and Innovation Programme should work towards delivering the programme vision.
The key goals for this national digital engagement programme are as follows:
- To inspire and support UK Science Centres to develop new participatory and innovative digital ways to collaborate with under-served and under-represented communities and audiences.
- To explore and share digital methods that are most successful in growing and broadening audience engagement across under-represented communities. In this programme we want you to play to your strengths and those of your communities.
- To collaborate with, and understand the needs of, the groups you choose to work with and to co-create content and ideas with your groups. For clarification these groups can be any community groups, including youth groups, adults, families, special interest groups or others, but not school groups.
- To create a legacy in the way Science Centres co-create and develop their digital engagement and nurture community relationships that will continue into the future.
Key Audiences
1. The key audiences for this national programme are under-served families, adults and communities
a) Each Science Centre is free to define the groups within their communities they wish to work in a participatory manner with, giving the rationale as to why this group is under-served and what the project will allow the Centre and community to co-create.
b) Under-served for this project includes everyone who does not or cannot generally engage with Science Centres for whatever reason, including for example for socio-economic reasons, location, children, families and adults with special needs or disabilities, people shielding, and people without English as a first language.
We know that Science Centres define under-served differently, as a guide and for the avoidance of doubt, for this project we are focussing more of people living in the most deprived 40% of UK communities as given by the Indices of Multiple Deprivation, rather than the most deprived 10%.
2. Your participants and key audience can be children, families, young people and adults across all communities and ages. They can also include brownies and badged groups, youth groups and out of school clubs in relevant focussed parts of your regions, but not groups in school. These examples are given here as we know the words formal and informal mean different things to different centres.
3. The programme also focusses on Science Centre staff, in particular digital managers and communications teams (including social media) working alongside Community managers in Science Centres to find new ways to engage under-served communities digitally into the future. This is what created the legacy of this project. You may also want to include staff from your exhibitions, education and IT teams or bring in external expertise and digital developers as professional development and project support.
What is on offer for participating Science and Discovery Centres
- Up to £15,000 grant for your Science Centre to support your Digital Engagement and Innovation project, which may be spent on staff time and other costs. Further details are in the Grants Section below. You may apply for less if you wish.
- Three Digital Masterclasses between February and June 2021 to train two members of staff from each selected Science Centre. These will bring together expertise and speakers from selected Science Centres along with external digital engagement experts. These Masterclasses will cover a host of interactive tools, projects that have engaged communities in new ways digitally, new techniques and top tips. They will also share skills, knowledge and approaches between Science Centres that have been successful in engaging new communities during Covid-19 restrictions and find ways to use insights from digital engagement to support other parts of your audience engagement strategies.
- Ongoing support for the Science Centres from the ASDC Digital manager, including mechanisms for peer-to peer support to share best practice in engaging new communities.
- Opportunities to share expertise between Science Centres in the partnership and other national programmes, on community engagement and working with families and communities who do not currently engage.
To apply for this programme download the full Invitation To Participate and the Application Form at the top of this page.
Applications for this programme closed on 29th January 2021.
