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Audience Development

Shows Lesley pointing at a mug that reads About the author

Dr Lesley Paterson is a strategic and creative leader, practitioner and evaluator with over 20 years’ experience in public and community engagement and knowledge exchange (KE). Has led a whole variety of engagement programmes and projects: including PI for the £1M+ Wellcome-funded grants scheme Enriching Engagement (University of Oxford) to nurture high-quality engaged research; project lead for the complex, multi-partner project Curiosity Carnival (500+ researchers; 150+ activities; 7 venues; engaged 10,000+), in addition to facilitating participatory and dialogue engagement work.

Lesley is an Honorary Research Associate, Science & Technology Studies, University College London; UK Evaluation Society member; REF 2021 Impact Assessor; KE Concordat Evaluator; a #ResearchRevolutionary and was previously the University of Oxford’s Head of Public Engagement with Research; her first public engagement role was working for a sheep (called Dolly).

She is the Director of the Engagement Associates: a consultancy specialising in Engagement; Exchange & Evaluation.

Twitter: @lesleyapaterson

Linked-In: linkedin.com/in/lesley-paterson

Contents

Part 1: Background

  • Why think about who you want to engage?
  • Who are the ‘Public’ in Public Engagement?

Part 2: Defining your audience

  • Ways to explore and describe publics and communities
  • Exploring public and community engagement audiences or participants

Part 3: Working with your audience

  • Reaching your audiences
  • Values, Ethics, Safeguarding & Inclusion
  • Evaluation

Further Information