COMMUNICATION

Social media

With our social media, we reached many iGEM members, but also many people outside the iGEM community. Using the ‘insights’ section of our Instagram ( @igemtudelft ) we received some information about our outreach on social media, and discovered that we reached 5k accounts with our promotional video, and 4.5k with our project reveal. All other posts have a total reach of 15k accounts. On LinkedIn, we reached another 5k accounts.

We also took over the Instagram page of our university ( @tudelft ) with 52k followers, meaning that we could post stories for a day. The series of 8 stories has been watched 3k times on average per story. In these posts, we introduced the team, explained what our project is, and what synthetic biology is and showed some lab scenes and scenes of us flyering. Our goal was to introduce the iGEM competition and iGEM TU Delft to more TU Delft students.

Next to that, many news agencies also posted a story when they wrote an article about us.

Media training

Since drink spiking can lead to very traumatic experiences, namely sexual assault and rape, it is of utmost importance to realize that the topic of drink spiking is a sensitive topic. Our Outreach & Education manager and Team Leader followed a media training given by Sanne van den Broek and Dimmy van Ruiten, assistants in external communication, science communication & press contact of TU Delft. We received advice on how to answer certain difficult questions asked by journalists and how to steer the interview to whatever is most important for you to communicate. We also practiced these skills.

Press

After the start of our crowdfunding , we started contacting local press and news agencies. Dimmy van Ruiten, our supervisors and Charlotte de Kort, head of the communication department of our university's faculty helped us write an English and Dutch press release. The press releases can be found here . In the press releases, we talked about what iGEM is, what iGEM’s goal is, what our project is and how our product works. This press release was sent to one or two local news agencies, after which the news spread rapidly. That week, we had many news articles published, video segments taken and were featured in multiple radio segments. All media attention is summarized in Table 1.

It can be seen in Table 1 that mostly Dutch news agencies have been involved. An example of an outreach project that we have been involved in is the radio segment of Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) on Radio 1. NOS is one of the largest public broadcast corporations in the Netherlands. We were invited for a phone interview live broadcasted on Radio 1, the national radio station of Dutch Public Broadcasting. A transcript of the radio interview can be found here .

There were several goals we had in mind for the press. Our biggest and foremost goal was to teach more people about synthetic biology and its applications. This was done by mentioning that we are participating in the iGEM competition, a synthetic biology competition. We also shortly explain what synthetic biology is. By mentioning that projects such as these are possible with synthetic biology, we hope to make more people excited about the topic. Furthermore, we wanted to create more awareness about drink spiking and GHB spiking. We wanted to do this to highlight drink spiking severity, and to remove the guilt and shame that victims might have about it. More awareness about spiking might also create more campaigns or initiatives to prevent drink spiking. Lastly, we wanted to promote our crowdfunding as well. We saw that after most press projects, more donations were made.

OWee activity market

We noticed throughout our iGEM project that the iGEM competition and the iGEM TU Delft team were not as popular as other student competitions and student teams from TU Delft. Therefore, we wanted to put more effort into teaching TU Delft students about iGEM, synthetic biology and our project. The OWee activity market was a big information market where former TU Delft students and newly enrolled TU Delft students. iGEM TU Delft also had a stand where we talked to students about what iGEM is, what synthetic biology is and what our project was. They could also participate in a guessing contest. We filled an Erlenmeyer with Eppendorfs and they had to guess how many Eppendorfs were in the Erlenmeyer to win a SPYKE polo. See Figures 1 and 2.

Flyering sessions

Our team also organized flyering sessions in The Hague in September. We had three goals with these flyering sessions. First of all was to teach people more about synthetic biology, about our project and let them fill in our survey about possible applications of our sensor. More about the survey can be found in Integrated Human Practices.

BOC seminar

To gather valuable information about the view of scientists at our department, biocatalysis (BOC), we gave a 20 minute seminar about project SPYKE. This seminar was attended by more than 30 scientist with an expertise in biocatalysis, surface immobilization and microbiology. In this seminar, we explained the problem of drink spiking and the science behind our project. We received many questions and comments on our project. Most of the advice received was also implemented in the later experiments.