Since I joined Wellcome’s Public Engagement team in late 2016, we’ve been busy. We launched a new funding scheme, supported countless projects, appointed new Fellows and worked with amazing new partners. But the biggest thing we’ve been doing is developing a new public engagement strategy.

Wellcome’s mission is to improve life for everyone by helping great ideas thrive. As an institution, we’re being increasingly proactive in how we achieve that – for example by setting priority areas such as drug-resistant infections and vaccines – and by becoming more globally oriented.

Over the past year we’ve been testing new ways of funding and partnerships, supporting more innovative projects, and taking on board lots of support, opinions and challenges from existing partners as well as from some critical friends who we haven’t worked with.

The biggest shift is that we want to be much more focused on outcomes. It’s not enough for us to know that public engagement is happening and reaching lots of people – we need to know how it’s contributing to Wellcome’s mission, and how to improve it.

This new outcomes-led approach means that we need to change how we operate.The sectors we’ve worked with closely for years will continue to be important to us, but we’ll be focusing on outcomes, and working harder to learn from best practice in other grant-giving sectors. This means we need to improve our ability, and that of our grantees, to use and to create the evidence that underpins our work.

Read the full article about how their public engagement strategy is changing at Wellcome.