QGEM established a multidisciplinary approach for communicating with our local community and global iGEM community. Much of our work in reaching the Kingston community was achieved through educational workshops as described on our Education page, while much of our communication with our fellow iGEM teams is outlined on our Collaborations/Partnership pages. However, outside of the previously mentioned initiatives QGEM also launched two social media campaigns this year.

The versatility of social media has allowed us to grow our reach across our city and the iGEM community. In the last 90 days we have increased our following by 8.6% and had an overall increase in reach of 80.2%. Thus, our Instagram proved a formidable platform to raise awareness to the local issue that inspired our project, as well as its global prevalence.

Yearly, August 9th is regarded by the United Nations as the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. The QGEM team saw this as an amazing time to highlight the scientific achievements of the world’s Indigenous peoples, while simultaneously educating students on significant members of the scientific community. We established a social media campaign program where other iGEM teams could access a template post and caption, in order to honour an individual indigenous to their country who has impacted the scientific community. Ten teams posted a headshot, small description, and #IDWIPqGEM2022 to their Instagram feeds and stories on August 9th to amplify the accomplishment of Indigenous individuals across the globe.

To spread the knowledge of global water containment and scarcity issues to our local community, QGEM posted a fact to Instagram for each day of World Water Week during August 23rd- September 1st. Informing the local community on global issues helps to remind our city of the privilege we hold and reminds us of the importance of protecting natural resources. Although 23% of our followers reside in the Kingston area, to ensure our information reached a wide variety of audiences we encouraged businesses to share our posts to their social media pages. For example, The Keep Refillery, a small business located downtown Kingston, shared one of our World Water Week posts to their Instagram Story.

Despite our project having many facets within synthetic biology, water diagnostics, and Canadian issues, we framed our main communication around amplifying Indigenous voices on a global scale and raising awareness for water contamination and scarcity issues. We believed focusing on distributing knowledge to our city and global community on these two subjects was the most important to our educational goals.