Author: Angel Figueroa Perea – UNAM, Mexico

Communicate science demands passion, creativity, and constant improvement. But above all, we urgently need to listen to our audiences and stop seeing them as a passive subject. It is necessary to understand their needs, motivations, their day-to-day lives, knowledge, beliefs and concerns to better serve them.

To address this, the General Council of Science Outreach from Mexico National University, has made a particular effort to reveal the broad “picture” of Mexicans and has tried to develop different tools to produce interesting content covering science topics.

To support this, for the last three years the Council has led research called “El perfil del mexicano”, which gathers surveys, benchmarks and statistics, as well as different POVs from authors that provide a broad perspective of the audiences social, economic and cultural reality, among other aspects.

This information also allows us to analyze why Mexicans have certain preferences/consumption patterns, religious practices, places of interest, why someone may or may not be interested in science.

Based on these results, our materials were given a boost by providing them with new elements in language and design, allowing them to be closer to realities of daily life from target audiences.

To exemplify, we publish weekly “UNAMirada a la Ciencia” which is a publication targeting lower income audiences with an average of a high school education. The distribution of this popular publication is national and it’s coverage by nature includes variety of topics simply explained. Different versions of the materials also live in print such as posters and are distributed in the whole country.

If we want a country that is more involved in science, it is important to challenge the current dialogue, it is important to know in depth the target audience and see them not only from what we want to cover but what they want to hear.

The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.

Presentation type: Individual paper
Theme: Science
Area of interest: Investigating science communication practices