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How to Promote Your Science Blog
Crowdfunding Questions With Petridish.org Co-founder Matt Salzberg
Jul 9th
A few weeks ago I was approached by the folks at Petridish.org, asking if I’d be interested in doing a post on their science crowdfunding site. I’m fascinated by crowdfunding and think that it has a huge amount of potential, both as a means of funding science, and as a means of incentivizing science communication - in a world where the public funds your research directly, you have much more incentive to communicate with them about your work. Since I didn’t know much about Petridish.org at the time, I asked if one of their founders would be interested in doing an interview with me instead. Below is that interview, with Petridish.org co-founder Matt Salzberg. More on Matt can be found at the bottom of this post.
I have yet to try crowdfunding myself, but if you have any experience with Petridish or any other crowdfunding platform (or thoughts on which platform(s) will eventually succeed and pull away from the rest of the pack) I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
1. Simple question: what is crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding reflects the power of the internet to pool the collective actions of many small participants to make a larger project happen. In the case of Petridish.org, we help scientists and researchers raise funding for their projects from people who are passionate about their work.
2. Could you describe what Petridish.org is, and how it works?
Petridish.org is the largest crowdfunding website devoted entirely to science and research funding. Researchers post materials about a project they want to launch, and contributors on our site can donate to those projects in exchange for rewards and other tokens of appreciation.
Typically, researchers set a goal and a deadline by which they hope to raise the money. If they reach the goal by the deadline, then the project is successfully funded. If they don’t reach the goal, no money changes hands.
3. What gave you the idea for starting Petridish.org?
Before starting Petridish.org, I worked at a large venture capital firm and became interested in the power of the internet to transform the way things were funded. One website, kickstarter had become very successful in raising money for art and creative projects. I wanted to bring that power to science funding, which is an interest area of mine and is an area that desperately needs new models for funding.
4. Can you give a rough idea of the % of projects that have been funded so far, and how much funding has been received by researchers (either the average amount or the total across all projects)?
We’ve done significantly in excess of $100,000 of transaction volume since launching earlier this year. 80% of all of our projects have been successfully funded.
5. There have been a number of crowdfunding science websites in the past few years (Microryza, SciFlies.org, Science Donors, MyProjects, Open Genius, #SciFund Challenge, etc), many of which seem to have trouble taking off. What makes Petridish.org different and/or more likely to succeed?
There are a few things that make us different. First, we’ve focused on building a high quality, fun web experience for contributors. Aside from our focus on design, we hand select only the most interesting and impactful projects to feature on our site, including those with great videos, pictures and rewards. Many of the existing sites focus exclusively on the experience for the scientist raising money- we cater to both sides of the marketplace.
Second, we only do “all or nothing” funding. We do this because it protects the scientist from having to do a project without sufficient funding and it protects contributors who wouldn’t want to donate to a project that doesn’t have enough funding to go through. It also encourages people to really pull together to promote a project, since a project won’t happen without enlisting the support of others as well.
6. The crowdfunding science initiative that I’ve been most impressed with is the #SciFund Challenge, since they’ve partnered with Rockethub to bring their projects to a wider audience, and also done a lot of work to promote science communication. How are you bringing people to Petridish.org to see the projects that are listed there?
We do extensive web marketing activities to help the projects get funded. We have presences on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, which helps drive people to our projects. We also have a weekly newsletter that sends the projects to thousands of our supporters. And we’re building relationships with larger media companies for regular press coverage. The all or nothing mechanism also really incentivizes people to share the projects and enlist their friends to help the project get funded.
Top 5 Twitter Etiquette Tips
Mar 29th
While I claim to be no expert on Twitter etiquette, I would hope that over the past 2 years of tweeting I have picked up at least a few morsels of useful info.
Whenever I’ve tried to explain how Twitter works, I use the analogy of attending a large party with some potentially important guests in attendance.
Tip #1: How to make a Twitter entrance
As is the case with large parties, you know very few people there. Thus, when you first get there, you want to introduce yourself to as many people as possible.
But you wouldn’t simply enter through the front door holding a megaphone and announce to everyone present: “HELLO I AM JOHN AND I WOULD LIKE TO TALK TO ALL OF YOU!”
That is, you don’t want to just blindly follow hundreds or even thousands of people without really getting to know any of them, and giving them an opportunity to learn something about you.
Most appropriate method would be to introduce yourself to a few people at a time, and to move around the room, slowly building contacts. More >
Weekend Roundups - An Easy Way to Help Your Readers
Feb 26th
For the past year on Obesity Panacea, Peter and I have been doing a weekend post linking to articles and blog posts that we think might be of interest to our readers. We didn’t come up with this idea ourselves - in fact we quite happily copied it from Darya Pino (Summer Tomato) and Yoni Freedhoff (Weighty Matters) among others. We aren’t able to post one every weekend, but we try to do one whenever we have time.
Making this type of weekly roundup post is easy - we typically just look back over our tweets from the past week and/or the interesting links we’ve forwarded on to colleagues, and then arrange them into a list. If we didn’t spend much time online in the past week, we will quickly visit popular blogs in our area, or see if there have been any useful posts on Researchblogging.org. Whereas a typical post on peer reviewed research can take up to a few hours, a roundup post rarely takes more than a few minutes. And yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if roundup posts were among the most useful for any blog. Why? Roundup posts perform two key functions:
1. Weekly roundups provide extremely useful content to your readers More >
Working with your Public/Media Relations office: A primer for researchers
Nov 29th
Editor’s note: As I video-blogged last week, our post on why scientists should blog got bounced around the web a good bit and resulted in a number of generous mentions on other blogs (check the trackbacks to view). Among these mentions was Andrew Careaga’s Higher Ed Marketing blog, a wonderful resource on all matters related to marketing and public relations in higher education. After a brief exchange via Twitter, Andrew graciously agreed to provide a post for Science of Blogging on how researchers can work with the public relations or media department at their host institution to get their research across to a wider audience. As the first official guest contributor on Science of Blogging, here’s Andrew.
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Peter’s excellent case study on why scientists should blog led me to share my perspective on this subject. As a public relations/communications professional working in higher education, I think it’s fantastic that Peter shares his ideas by blogging. I wish more researchers would follow his lead. Frankly, it would make the media relations aspects of my job easier and probably more enjoyable.
The way I see it, researchers who blog about their work provide a public service. They’re sharing their knowledge with a broader audience than the readership of scientific or academic journals. (A very good Tufts University feature about academics who blog illustrates the value from their perspective.) And by responding to blog comments and exchanging ideas with other bloggers (as I’m doing here), researchers are able to interact with people beyond their disciplines.
Ideally, the media relations folks on college campuses are valuable partners for scholar-bloggers who want to get their research ideas out to the public. PR folks should not serve as personal publicists for certain faculty members – although most of us in the PR field know of a few professors who would love it if that were the case. Rather, we are partners in disseminating scholarship. We can do so not only by publicizing faculty research, but also by talking about the researchers’ own public-service blogging, and by pointing journalists and others to the researchers’ own blogging efforts.
So, how can researchers work with media relations staff? Here are a few suggestions. More >
How to Promote Your Science Blog: ResearchBlogging.org
Nov 26th
One of the most difficult aspects of starting a new blog is attracting readers. For the first few months after Peter and I started our blog on obesity research, we averaged 5-10 hits per day, at least half of which were due to the two of us refreshing the site on different computers! This can be incredibly frustrating, since you are putting a lot of time and effort into creating valuable content that few people are able to enjoy. Luckily there are a number of tools that you can use to attract new readers right from the start, with one of the most important being ResearchBlogging.org.
Research Blogging is a website that aggregates blog posts that discuss peer-reviewed research. The blog post must discuss the research in a relatively in-depth fashion (e.g. the post must do more than simply summarize the abstract), but this is something that many science blogs do on a fairly regular basis. If you discuss peer-reviewed studies on your blog, then you simply need to register your blog with Research Blogging, and then insert the Research Blogging citation code into each blog post which discusses a peer-reviewed journal article. For example, on our obesity blog roughly 1/3 to 1/2 of our posts discuss the results of a peer-reviewed paper, and so we include the Research Blogging code on each of those articles. These posts then get advertised on the Research Blogging main page, as well as the sidebar of the Scienceblogs network (Scienceblogs and Research Blogging are both owned by SEED media group). This is huge, as Scienceblogs is one of the most popular science websites in the world. So by signing up for Research Blogging, you are basically getting your work advertised for free, on a tremendously popular website that caters to people who like to read about science.
That’s a pretty great deal! More >
