103 - Using Marketing Tools to Create an Interactive Research Impact Challenge

Background: The Lane Medical Library started an annual Research Impact Challenge in August 2019. The goal of the challenge is to engage Stanford students, researchers, and faculty in activities related to scholarly presence. During the week-long event, participants receive daily emails with instructions for completing short tasks related to boosting the impact of their work. Topics include curating an online scholarly and professional presence, sharing data and other research outputs, self-archiving publications, receiving feedback on work in progress, leveraging social media to make connections and promote works, and monitoring impact.

Description: In 2021, the Marketing & Communications team partnered with the Research Communications Librarian to make the challenge more interactive and flexible for multiple skills levels. We used MailChimp to collect sign-ups as well as design and schedule the daily emails. Each email included multiple options so users could choose the task or experience level that best suited their needs. For example, when the tasks were about ORCID, participants could select whether or not they already had an ORCID profile. Using MailChimp allowed us to measure email open rates and click rates to get a better understanding of participants’ interactions. As an added benefit, collecting emails in MailChimp automatically produced a list of people interested in research impact. We used the list to market our fall series of research impact classes, and we will continue engaging with participants throughout the year.

Conclusion: After the challenge ended, we reviewed the engagement data in MailChimp and noticed some trends. Our email open rate stayed fairly consistent throughout the five-day challenge, however, the click rate dropped significantly toward the end of the challenge. This shows that participants were less likely to follow up on challenge tasks as the week progressed. Based on this data, we plan to explore alternative challenge formats next year such as spacing the challenge tasks out over a longer period to see if the timing impacts engagement.