The 'ilikesocialsciences' project aimed to raise awareness of the social sciences to the general public.
With support from the ESRC and the University, the Vertical Plus social media team hosted a three stage project, which asked social sciences advocates (FE and HE students and lecturers) to talk about how their experience of social sciences has influenced or changed their perspective about themselves and the world around them.
Project results were displayed in this 18-day exhibition, which took place before, during and after the ESRC Festival of Social Science.
Stage 1
- Raising awareness of the event by contacting social science advocates (generally social science students).
- Students thought about how the social sciences have changed their lives and how this might be summarised in a few, very short words.
Stage 2
- Advocates were asked to post or tweet their thoughts or quotes about the social sciences on Facebook and Twitter during a social media day on Wednesday 2 November.
- The activity aimed to create specific growth and momentum to entice further advocates to join the project to make it 'trend' or 'go viral'.
- It was anticipated that the project team would post over 400 positive messages with advocates posting over 600 positive messages.
- Advocates had a chance to win Amazon gift vouchers for participating.
Stage 3
- Outputs from the social media day were presented as part of an exhibition stand in the Roland Levinsky Building during and after the festival week.
- The exhibition included postcards with quotes from social science advocates showing the best outputs of the day.