Hello fellow CoP members
I am a knowledge broker with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA). CCSA employs knowledge brokers and communications advisors, both of which have responsibility to communicate with the public and other key stakeholder groups. There appears to be a need for role clarity between these two professional groups. There is definitely some overlap in roles and likely some was of articulating the functions that are clearly in the domain of one or the other. I have been tasked with identifying the KB portion and then working with Communications to develop processes that provide direction to both groups as to who should be involved at which stages of the knowledge translation process.
How have your organizations distinguished between the two roles (Knowledge Broker and Communications) and described processes that include both professionals in the KTE process?
Cheers
Paula
Hi Paula,
We’re struggling with the same thing at the Mental Health Commission, and it’s worse in my position on the web team – I’m officially assigned to our KE group but work very closely with Comms (I joke about having two managers).
Basically, we have a KE person and a Comms person on every project. KE handles the webinars/CoPs/report dissemination/etc., and liaison with the project team, while the Comms team handles media relations, press releases, news events and so on. It’s not a perfect split, but it’s not bad.
I come from a corporate marketing background, and approach KE with much more of a marketing view than a traditional KE view. Some of my solutions are more Comms/Marketing than pure KE, especially online. This creates some raised eyebrows among the KE folk, but Comms understands what I’m doing. I’m not sure what the appropriate split is – it’s a Venn diagram with more overlap than discrete circles.
I think the KBs and the Comms people have a lot to teach each other. We’ve forced a lot of overlap at the Commission, and things are working out pretty well.