Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Outreach

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• Events

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• Finding partners

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Outreach

As one of the rather few groups involved in synthetic biology and as the only iGEM team in Finland, we had two major goals in outreach: First, we wanted to increase knowledge of synthetic biology and its possibilities among the general public, students, educators, researchers as well as in industry and business. Second, we aimed to increase awareness of iGEM among students, researchers and educators as potential future iGEM participants, instructors and mentors. Furthermore, we promoted iGEM to industry, business and NGOs as potential supporters of future iGEM teams.

Events

(texts on drive)

Media

To increase awareness of synthetic biology and iGEM among the general public, students, researchers and industry we approached a variety of magazines and newspapers, as well as other media outlets. The articles we were featured on can be found below.

Website

Already in the very beginning of Aalto-Helsinki 2015 we built a presentable website for our project, even before we had our project idea. We started searching for supporters early on, and we thought website would be a good way to shortly present our project to potential sponsors and other people interested in our project. The site shortly described in both Finnish and English what synthetic biology and iGEM is about, as well as our goals and our team. As the project progressed, we included information on our project and our supporters.

Wiki

In creating the wiki, we had several goals we had to balance. We wanted it to be simple and clean, but also beautiful and pleasant to browse. The wiki needs to be easy to navigate, a task much more challenging than we initially thought. Visitors need to be able to get a good overview of our project with little effort, but on the other hand, we need to have every aspect of our project thoroughly covered for those looking for more detailed information.

We started early and made step-by-step schedules for the wiki development to ensure that we had time to think the design, structure and the other various details in wiki development through. We considered many different kinds of structures, including having fewer but larger categories and having a walkthrough-wiki structure, somewhat similar to SDU Denmark. After a plenty of planning and discussion we decided to go with eight categories with a summary of each category on its main page and the details in the subpages.

Social media

We kept active on social media throughout the summer. Our team page on Facebook has about 450 likes and on Twitter we have over 350 followers. While it is great to see how many international followers we have, it is especially wonderful how much interest there is towards synthetic biology in Finland, reflected on our likes and followers from Finland. For people to be able to get a better sense of what we’re doing, we published a blog on Tumblr. On the blog we posted updates on our progress, daily tasks and on special events, among other things. Additionally, each week a team member profile was published.

Finding partners

It was absolutely crucial to find partners for us to succeed in our project and without them, there would have been little we could have achieved. Thankfully, we already had the four first big steps in forming an iGEM team covered by the 2014 team and their mentor Markus Linder: we had the students forming the team, Markus as our Mentor, a lab bench to work at and the registration fee taken care of.

Universities

We quickly proceeded to find more partners. We first contacted our own universities for support as well as to raise awareness of synthetic biology and our project. Early on, we met with Rector Jukka Kola and Vice-Rector Keijo Hämäläinen from University of Helsinki to present our project. It was super-encouraging to see how interested they were in our project and to hear that they would support us. We also met with two Aalto University Deans, from the School of Science and the School of Chemical Engineering. They were also really fascinated about iGEM and our major supporters. We were in contact with different Faculties in the University of Helsinki, who were supportive as well. We were not only glad about receiving help, but it was also great to see how the two universities really came together for a common cause.

Companies, organizations and foundations

To contact companies, organizations and foundations, we formed a partnership squad within our team. In this work our goal was not just to raise money to cover our costs, but also to raise awareness of synthetic biology within companies and NGOs. Countless applications were written, and we indeed managed to get support from outside our universities as well. Besides this, the contacts we had gave us opportunities to reach out to a wider audience outside academia. For instance, the contacts we had led to our team members taking part in a workshop organized by the Chemical Industries Finland and writing a blog post about synthetic biology and our project on the website of Bioeconomy, a Finnish government program promoting usage of renewable resources to achieve sustainable development. We also contacted the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), conveniently located across the street, who helped us a lot with their technical expertise by giving us access to their special equipment.