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Co-creating “personas” to illuminate academic-policy engagement practice inside universities

⌚ Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Rafa Carrascosa Marzo

CAPE Capabilities and Impact Coordinator, UCL

Picasso is a PhD student in their first year of an art history doctoral degree. They’re at an early stage of their academic career, but are already considering their long-term career plans, including policy engagement. Nervous about where to start, Picasso wants to focus their work to achieve positive cultural impact and needs guidance on where they can find information about how to undertake policy engagement.

Do you recognise Picasso? Perhaps you’ve had similar enquiries from other early career researchers who are equally unsure about engaging with public policy. At the recent Association of Research Managers & Administrators (ARMA) conference in Brighton, the CAPE team delivered a workshop on policy engagement to one hundred university research management professionals. Our aim was to co-create “personas”, like Picasso’s, which represent the types of policy engagement enquiries research managers face. At the same time, this allowed us to discover how and when policy engagement is approached within research management timelines, systems, and teams. Along the way, we signposted where CAPE resources can support these enquiries.

Joining up research managers and policy engagement with engagement tools

As the representative body for research leaders, managers, and administrators ARMA (UK) works to enhance research management and administration by “identifying, establishing and exchanging good practice”. Academic-policy engagement and its wide range of activities intersects many phases of the research management process, from forming collaborations and shaping research questions based on policy needs, to managing grants and tracking the impact of policy-oriented research. As research managers, ARMA members are therefore an essential community in the continued planning and delivery of quality policy engagement.

It is often the case that in larger university infrastructures in particular, collaboration between research managers and policy engagement units is difficult. At ARMA we took the opportunity to highlight the potential application of CAPE resources at different stages of the research management journey.

For pre-award, for example, research managers could use our Project Scoping Template at the start of a project. Or they could use our Policy Fellowship Contract Guidance note to support the complex operational process of setting up academic placements in policy organisations.

For post-award, research managers might use our Hosting Policy Fellowships Guide, or our guide Optimal Conditions for Co-production to support collaborative projects.

For a full breakdown of CAPE resources, see the CAPE Resource Navigator.

Co-creating personas

Next, we challenged our workshop participants to co-develop archetypical researchers at different stages on the research journey from their professional experience. We asked: what type of enquiries do you encounter working in either pre- or post- award? To guide their development, we set the following prompts:

  • Who is this?
  • What questions are they asking?
  • What policy engagement might they be thinking about?
  • What stage of the “research journey” are they at?
  • What career stage are they?
  • What is the time scale?

Each of the personas below has been created from our workshop participants. They represent the wide variety of queries faced everyday by those in research management roles. Within each, we outline who they are, what options they could take, and what CAPE resources might help.

Discover the personas

Picasso is a PhD student, in their first year of an arts degree. They are at a very early stage of their academic career, but they are already considering their long-term research career plans, including policy engagement. Given their circumstances, they are full of doubts and do not know where their work could be focused on for achieving positive impact.

They ask questions such as where to start; what resources are available to support them; who the contacts are they should be approaching; where can they find information on policymakers and areas of interest; what are the networks and teams at the university that could be helpful for them; and how to make their work more appealing and accessible for a wider audience, including policymakers.

Suggested next steps by workshop attendees

For the specific arts discipline, the policy priorities in GLAMA (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and Academia) may be a good initial point of engagement for their work and interests.

They should be mindful of the timescales and start planning early for these activities. They will need flexibility in their research journey and planning projects. The latter will benefit from building relationships in these networks and inviting other actors in the academic-policy space, such as policymakers and civil servants, to co-create projects that could achieve the desired impact.

CAPE resources and reading

Developments in participative democracy: Reflections by Newham Council Policy Fellow Darren Sharpe

Andreas is an early career researcher in chemistry that has never engaged with policymakers with his research but is keen on translating his research outputs into policy recommendations. He wants to include policy reports as outputs for prospective fund applications, but he needs to be more concrete.

At first, he is posing questions such as who is he trying to reach? (UK wide, regional, local); what options does he have available for engagement (should he approach his MP); what support can he receive from his institution; and more practical things such as how to write a policy brief.

Suggested next steps by workshop attendees

His possible courses of action would be responding to calls and policy needs as presented in Areas of Research Interest (ARIs) and in lists from All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPG). He should also think about connecting with academics and institutes that already have connections for training and coaching opportunities.

Since he is at an early stage of his career, he will find difficulties in conciliating this engagement work with the development of his research, how can he justify the time expenditure not dedicated to publishing, especially in ECR probation periods? Additionally, the process take time as these connections and rapport are not built up quickly, it is a long-term commitment.

CAPE resources and reading

CAPEcast episode 1: Academic-Policy engagement for regional development

CAPEcast episode 2: Towards co-production – how academics can engage with local government

Janet is a mid-career social scientist with a focus on public health interventions. She is at the end of a project and is wondering how she could get her research in front of policymakers. She understands that she needs resources to inform her approach and the help of intermediaries such as the appropriate support units at her institution.

Her immediate concerns are how she makes her research stand out amongst other experts; how can she identify the adequate policymakers and create and strengthen relationships with them; how can she distil her research’s findings into an easy-to-understand format that is not a trade-off for accuracy and nuance; and how can she develop a plan of engagement.

Suggested next steps by workshop attendees

The main obstacles she faces have to do with understanding and adapting to policy cycles and timescales. Navigating the policy ecosystem is another element to factor in, she needs to understand the government’s agenda on the issue as well as the third sector institutions involved in it.

Policy support units at her institution can provide her with the contacts and guidance required to clear these obstacles and to ensure her credibility and successful engagement.

CAPE resources and reading

Space for community voices – how peer research contributed to a deeper understanding of social infrastructure

Informing or influencing: the roles academics can play when engaging with policy

Fatima is a professor in community development studies. Her work is data-based and practice-based with refugee communities at risk of exclusion and economic hardship for many years. She has an interest in extending the impact of her research to policymakers.

She is first considering what her policy messages are, what part of policy is her research relevant to, and if anyone will be interested in these topics as opposed to bigger problems. A challenge she faces is the communities she has worked with are wary of policy makers as they have often been let down by them.

Suggested next steps by workshop attendees

This engagement could take the shape of knowledge exchange events, the synthesis of a policy brief, or working with the third sector where she can meet others with an aligned ethos. She could also make use of Policy Support Funding for impact acceleration or UKRI impact acceleration accounts (IAA) funding, if her institution can provide it, bearing in mind that amounts may vary.

As she is an established researcher with many commitments and projects to follow up on, her timescale is constrained by the period covered by the grants of the specific projects through which she is trying to inform policymakers.

CAPE resources and reading

Quid pro quo? Why academics meet with policy professionals

Toward wellbeing-based government: formalising a ‘Roundtable’ methodology

Discussion

After co-creating our personas, we invited participants to reflect upon commonalities across the personas and what they tell us about policy engagement within research. Our participants highlighted the following key points:

  1. Confidence often poses a greater challenge than capability, especially in participatory research where community distrust and researchers’ reservations can be significant barriers to political engagement. Knowledge exchange opportunities, fellowships in policy organisations, and mentoring, can help to build confidence.
  2. Context specific guidance on navigating the policy landscape is essential. Specialised university professional services units and resources like CAPE toolkits, Areas of Research Interest (ARIs) and the All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) and funding sources such as Policy Support Funds (PSF) and the Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) are valuable.
  3. Small teams, and limited funding, necessitate a clear academic-policy engagement strategy to manage demand. Strategic advice from universities leaders on prioritising efforts can help staff to navigating the policy environment, especially in response to new developments such as the creation of new combined authorities.
  4. Career stage can affect policy engagement experiences. Participants reflected that PhD students and ECRs were eager to engage but didn’t always have the depth of research required for all types of engagement, while mid and later career academics might have deeper research may be reluctant due to time constraints and other factors.

Connect university infrastructure to improve support

Delivering our workshop at the ARMA conference provided insights into how to strengthen the academic-policy engagement infrastructure within universities. The participant discussions demonstrated the importance of involving research managers in supporting academic-policy engagement to achieve meaningful impact. For example, at the start 80% of the audience were unaware of CAPE resources but by the end of the session, the same percentage considered likely or very likely to use these resources in their roles. We must join up efforts across universities – both internally and across the UK – to help support our academics like Picasso.

What we also saw is the diverse and complex landscape of how UK universities support research planning, delivery, and management. As interest in public policy engagement grows, especially in preparation for impact case studies, our hope is that CAPE resources, blogs, podcasts, and case studies provide wider thinking and discussion and prompt further discussion on the variety of academic-policy engagement pathways and benefits to this type of engagement.