Led by a team in our Research & Enterprise directorate, an institution-wide Engagement Forum was established in September 2021 to act as an advisory and consultative group at key stages of the design, development and delivery of a wide range of University engagement activities. This encompasses research, teaching, industry collaboration and enterprise, and is informed by University values around widening participation, corporate social responsibility, public involvement and communication.
The Forum is chaired by Professor Andy Miah, Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, and seeks to support colleagues and students in their ambitions to foster engagement practices and contribute to identifying and promoting good practice, as well as to nurture the maintenance of Salford’s outward-facing profile.
The key motivation behind the Forum is to align closely with the 8 guiding principles set out in the newly established Knowledge Exchange Concordat, to which Salford became a signatory in 2021. This commits us to developing our knowledge exchange activity to help drive economic, social and cultural recovery and growth.
We do this by delivering against our Mission, developing our Policies and Processes, enhancing our Engagement, demonstrating how we Work Transparently and Ethically, providing support around Capacity Building, ensuring that we develop a system for Recognition and Rewards, evidencing our Continuous Improvement and putting in place measures for Evaluating Success.
Current Engagement Forum activities include:
- Developing an engagement strategy to complement our institutional Industry Collaboration strategy and associated Innovation Strategy
- Designing a suite of engagement toolkits to support our staff in their public-facing activities
- Creating a calendar of events that links up all of our main internal and external engagement activity, including our involvement in research festivals across the year
- Coordinating our new internal Festival of Innovation for summer 2022
- Engaging with our key local stakeholders more effectively through proposed communities of practice
- Finding an effective way to assess and evidence the impact of our work
We are committed to driving our University-wide engagement further through our Engagement Forum, which now provides us with a platform to more effectively coordinate our activities across all departments and divisions and to better communicate and evidence the amazing engagement work that our staff, both academic and professional support, as well as our students, undertake throughout the year.
To find out more about the engagement activities that we are involved with, please go to the University of Salford website at: https://www.salford.ac.uk/research or explore the pages on our Research with Impact blog at: https://blogs.salford.ac.uk/research/