Effective Strategies for Universities to Increase the External Impact of Their Research

Australian universities produce world-class research. The challenge is rarely the quality of the work — it's making the work visible and legible to the people outside the university who need to understand it, fund it, partner with it, or apply it.

External impact doesn't happen automatically once the research is published. It requires a deliberate communications and engagement strategy that runs in parallel with the research itself — not as an afterthought once the findings are in.

Why external impact consistently falls short

The most common failure mode is translation. Researchers are trained to communicate with precision to peer audiences. They are rarely trained to communicate the same ideas to an industry partner who wants to know what problem this solves, to a government department that wants to know what the policy implication is, or to a journalist who wants to know why anyone should care today.

The gap between research excellence and external impact is almost always a communications gap. And in most universities, the infrastructure to close that gap is either understaffed, undervalued, or disconnected from the research itself.

Strategies that actually work

Build external impact into the research lifecycle from the start

The most effective universities don't wait for a project to conclude before thinking about its external audience. They identify potential stakeholders, partners, and media angles at the grant-writing stage and revisit them throughout the project. By the time findings are ready to share, the groundwork for their reception has already been laid.

Create a research communications capability, not just a media team

A media team issues press releases. A research communications capability translates complex science into value propositions that resonate with specific external audiences — industry, government, philanthropy, the public. The distinction matters because each audience needs a different frame and a different level of technical detail.

Develop researcher capability alongside institutional capability

The most credible voice for any research project is the researcher. Investing in communication skills — not just media training, but stakeholder engagement, LinkedIn presence, and public writing — multiplies the institution's reach at relatively low cost. Researchers who can speak to external audiences become magnets for partnership enquiries.

Measure what matters, not what is easy to count

Media mentions and social media reach are easy to report but they are not the same as external impact. Impact means stakeholder engagement, partnership enquiries, policy citations, and industry adoption. Define what success looks like for each research area and build measurement into the strategy from the outset.

Treat capability statements as strategic assets

A capability statement is often a university's first touchpoint with a potential industry or government partner. Most capability statements are written as inventories — here is what we have. The most effective ones are written as value propositions — here is what we can do for you, and here is the evidence that we can do it. The difference in engagement rates is significant.

The foundation everything else depends on

All of these strategies depend on one thing: a clear external visibility foundation. Without it, partnership opportunities don't gain traction, no matter how strong the research or how willing the potential partner.

Susan Blain Consulting builds exactly this visibility infrastructure. With direct experience at ANU Enterprise, including building communications and engagement strategies that made complex research visible and valuable to industry and government, we understand the specific constraints and opportunities that university research organisations face.

Find out more

University research consulting services: www.susanblain.com.au/services

Contact us to discuss your research visibility strategy: www.susanblain.com.au/contact

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