Achieving great press coverage

Running the press office for a university like Bedfordshire is an amazing job; and I have a feeling I may find anywhere else after this dull.

The adage ‘no day is ever the same’ really comes into play here – in fact no hour is ever the same!  Where else can you one minute be arranging an interview with a student on international placements, to the next sorting out filming for documentary for Ch4 on cyberstalking, to the next be pitching out case studies about our amazing female academics for International Women’s Day.

The University of Bedfordshire’s Press Office really is an inspiring place to work.

We’ve had particular success in highlighting our reputation around applied research. Over the past year we’ve covered everything from a new way to teach PE, England’s teenage pregnancy strategy, alcohol abuse in the over 50s, care robots, and 3D printing new limbs (a hand for an 8 year old boy – and it works).

The University’s applied research is easily relatable and the media understand its impact on people’s lives.  Our recent press coverage has included the Today programme, the Times, BBC Online, Newsnight, BBC Breakfast and 5Live.

However the press coverage for our latest piece of applied research on care robots exceeded even my wildest dreams.

It’s a great story – we’re helping to develop culturally aware robots that can improve the care of the elderly. It’s an international collaboration funded through the EU and the Japanese Government and has multiple international partners. Our role is evaluating the project - does it work?

The research was covered everywhere from the Today programme, to 5Live to the Times to BBC online; it was also picked up the Press Association. This was the same day that Trump put his Muslim travel ban into place but we still made it on to the BBC homepage for about four hours which was very exciting.

The return on investment for this piece of work was incredible.

We had over 300 individual pieces of coverage.  The print coverage alone gave circulation figures of 12.5m and it generated around 6bn unique page views.

If you want to find out more about this story take a look at this footage of Dr Chris Papadopoulos who leads on this research for the University, being interviewed by John Humphrys on the Today programme.