Our one-pagers detail how we used social media to raise awareness about the negative impacts of oxybenzone on our environment. We discussed how to reach a greater audience and use resources from social media platforms to connect with others. In addition, we displayed an example of our survey and infographics and how we posted these on Instagram. We also detailed an email example for reaching out to professors regarding giving us their input on our project. We also created a guidebook, in order to contribute an aspect of our project to future iGEM teams. In the guidebook, we discussed our understanding of climate change, and how we acknowledged this issue when creating our oxybenzone detection system.
Within this guidebook, we worked to create a basepoint that could help other teams understand the various causes and effects that surround climate change. It can also serve as an introduction to the environmental science related to climate change. The guidebook emphasizes that, despite the fact that climate change is an overarching issue that is hard to get rid of, we can focus on smaller solutions to create systems that solve big issues. It includes current research, so that other teams have an idea on what is already being worked on in the status quo.
As high school or college students without many connections, you may be worried about lacking the necessary input to develop the most successful project. In order to help conduct the necessary outreach, we suggest you take the social media approach on platforms we are all familiar with as teenagers. Though this approach may seem unprofessional, in the day and age we are in today, we found this was the best method as it is widely used and easily accessible. Even if there isn’t a significant presence of the problem your project is focused on, social media has the tools that will lead you to the contacts you will need to broaden your perspective. The important thing is, just as you would take great care in drafting out an email that sounds professional and respectful, you must maintain a similar tone when reaching out to people on social media (email/message examples based on our project from last year on the next page). For our project this year, when searching up hashtags such as “#reefsafe” and “#reefsafesunscreen,” we found many accounts that were providing guidance on identifying healthy sunscreen and educating others about the negative effects of sunscreen chemicals like oxybenzone. Since many of these public-facing activists and experts can be hard to track down, using work-related social media platforms like LInkedin can help you reach them in a professional yet casual setting. Experts who are active on social media are likely to be welcoming and cooperative towards public-facing collaboration opportunities. As you can see, social media is a very viable platform to spread and receive awareness to create a connection between your community and your project, but during this process it is also very important to take account of the privacy of any identifying information of survey takers and test subjects.
Email to relevant professors:
Dear Dr. ,
We are Del Norte High School’s iGEM team in San Diego, California, and are looking for some input and feedback based on your experience. iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) is a synthetic biology research competition in which teams worldwide create and present a research project on any compelling issue. After finding that chemicals in sunscreen have contributed to ocean pollution, we decided to target oxybenzone specifically. This year, our team is interested in pursuing a project with two aspects: detection and degradation. To be more specific, our goal is to transform e.coli into a biosensor, detect oxybenzone, and then transform e.coli (or another bacteria) by inserting a recombinant plasmid containing an enzyme that can degrade oxybenzone.
We found your research on ____ particularly intriguing and inspiring since we ___[how it relates to our project]_____, and we are hoping you could take some time to meet with us and provide us with guidance on our project.
Thank you for taking the time to read our project idea. Please let us know if you would be interested and comfortable with answering a few questions about your experiences with the impact of chemicals in sunscreen and marine life via a Zoom interview. We would also love to hear more about your experience in the medical field and your professional passions for a video series we are putting together. If you are interested and available, please let us know and we can figure out a date to meet!
Thank you,
DNHS iGEM
During our project for the past two years, we conducted a google form survey to gauge how knowledgeable our community is about the disease related to our project. Creating these surveys will also be a vital aspect for your project since it will also give direct answers showing whether you are going on the right path. It is also very important that this survey tests your community on specific facts and statistics about your project. You can then fill in the gaps through infographics that can be posted on social media platforms such as instagram.
This past year, our team created a 12 question survey about sunscreen, oxybenzone, coral bleaching, and FDA regulations relating to sunscreen (example questions shown below). This survey contained 4 multiple choice questions and 8 true/false questions. We highly recommend including a “not sure” option in order to help minimize inaccuracies caused by arbitrary guessing on questions. Our results showed that most of the questions were answered incorrectly or the individual was “not sure” of the answer. This inspired us to create a social media series of colorful infographics that contained the correct answers to the survey questions, which we posted on our @dnhsigem Instagram (example shown below) account. This was a great way to spread awareness about oxybenzone pollution and educate our followers to help them better understand our reasoning for targeting oxybenzone. These infographics were created on Canva.com. We first created an account on the website and picked a template for which we picked a color scheme that best fits our team theme before filing in the information for the post. Overall, this acted as our social media campaign in order to educate more people online on sunscreen, and shed light on the harmful and pollutive effects of oxybenzone that they may not be aware of. This is an especially helpful approach because it will allow you to maintain attention from your audience while providing thorough information on the topic in a quick, accessible manner. Especially in the digital age, where audiences are less and less willing to read through large paragraphs of text, conveying info in a memorable and concise way – such as through infographics – is crucial.