#BrexitScience Wins a PRCA Award

Back in May 2016 we published a data-led report which showed how universities, industry and not for profit organisations in the UK risked to lose annual EU research funding to the tune of a £1 Billion if the public voted for Brexit. The research we compiled was based on data from Dimensions from ÜberResearch (one of our portfolio companies) and GRID, our global, open database offering unique information on research organisations.

It caused quite a stir.

It was covered in major media outlets in the UK and around the world more than one hundred times in the week it was released, including in the Financial Times (front page no less), the Guardian, Economist, Times Higher Education, The Scotsman, the Evening Standard, NY Times and many more.  Our chief scientist Jonathan Adams went on BBC Newsnight and the BBC Sunday Politics show to talk about the consequences. The report has been downloaded from Figshare more than 1300 times. Our £1 billion lead statistic was highlighted and quoted widely around the world.

Brexit happened. Leave was an unexpected and undesirable result for the research and academic community.  To harness the huge discussion online, we created the #BrexitScience hashtag and invited people to share their thoughts and concerns. To date, more than 600 individuals have used it with a reach of more than eight million.

Last night, together with our PR agency Atomic PR, we attended the PRCA 2016 awards, held at the Hilton Hotel Park Lane, where the campaign was named the best B2B PR campaign in 2016. (The PRCA is Europe’s largest and most influential PR and communications membership body, so we are pretty pleased with ourselves.)

“The results of this campaign surpassed our expectations and then some, with interest from across the globe. The £1bn headline number we identified has become the de facto data point for the sum of competitive research funding supporting the UK research base from EU sources and has been quoted by everyone, from government officials to Brian Cox.”

If you have not read it yet, download the full report  here.