HSE Receives Award for Best Practices in Offline Communications
The Higher School of Economics has been declared the winner of the first Russian professional award for specialists in the field of science communications, ‘Communication Laboratory’, in the ‘Experiment’ category.
The ‘Communication Laboratory’ award, founded by Russian Venture Company (RVC), is the first Russian professional award for specialists in the field of science communications. Communication specialists and teams from research and education organizations (universities and research institutes), who showed outstanding achievements in popularizing science through their corporate communications, were awarded the prize for the first time in 2017.
During the candidate selection process, the Association of Communicators in Education and Science conducted a major study, which included an analysis of open sources at over 1,500 Russian universities and research institutions, a telephone survey of representatives of over 150 organizations, and finally in-depth research of 15 organizations selected by the Expert Council for the award shortlist and divided into categories.
HSE submitted several projects for consideration that were implemented in 2016 as part of the project ‘University open to the city’, which includes joint lectures with the Jewish Museum and the ‘Campus’ tolerance centre, the ‘HSE at VDNH’ project, and lecture projects at the ZIL culture centre, Gorky Park and Moscow museums.
The contest’s Expert Council took into account the projects’ innovative and creative formats, their scalability, and audience indicators, while assessing the shortlist of participants. Science communicators, journalists from TASS, Kommersant, N+1, Indicator.ru, Newspaper.ru, Science and life, and other media, Russia’s most quoted scholars, and representatives of foundations and development institutions were among the contest experts.
The awards ceremony was held during the first Forum for Science Communicators on March 20, 2017 at the platform of the Internet Initiatives Development Fund. According to the Expert Council, the Higher School of Economics was declared the winner in the ‘Experiment’ category. Artem Oganov, Professor at Skoltech and MIPT and science popularizer handed the winners their awards.
In February 2017 the Higher School of Economics press service took second place in the best news item in the ‘Communication Laboratory’ special category by RVC at the all-Russian competition for innovation journalism ‘Tech in Media 2016’. The prize was awarded for publications about studies regarding the distinctive features of ‘night owls’ and ‘early risers’ on the TASS website.