The pledges To raise awareness of both the important efforts and contributions of our members in healthcare, we made two pledges. These were:
• To promote the valuable contributions our members have made in healthcare
• To raise public awareness of biomedical science
Our actions We encouraged our President-Elect and our Council members to pose with our pledges and spread the word, we ran a news story about our pledges, created our own Twitter hashtag to promote our members (#LabLeaders) and asked our members to take part.
We also ran a second news story, sharing some of the best achievements of our members this year, whilst also promoting our pledges on Twitter and Facebook, which were seen by over 7000 people.
How we can improve Our hashtag #LabLeaders had little effect and weren’t really used. Perhaps more effort on our part to engage with our members and help promote their work and the field of biomedical science would have been more successful.
For next year we need to give our members more time to and information about FAB Change Week to encourage them to get involved.
We can start with our Council members and ask them to spread the word within their workplaces and we can promote any pledges we receive from them and our members.
On the plus side, people clicked on our news stories and read about what we were doing, so we did help spread the message of what we aimed to achieve.