The importance of trust, engagement and adaptability in workshop delivery for effective scientific communication

Effective scientific communication is dependent on multiple factors. Clarity in the message being relayed is key to success. This in turn is reliant on the ability of the communicator to understand the audience and deliver content in a manner appropriate to the audience. Furthermore, there is a need for the audience to trust the communicator. The establishment of this relationship of trusted communication underlies the ability to effectively share scientific information with a non-scientific audience. This chapter briefly discusses factors that influence this trusted relationship including scientific literacy, the "scientific expert", and transparency in science. Insights from experiences delivering science workshops and lectures to a range of audiences are presented. During these experiences valuable lessons were learned on the importance of understanding the audience in order to have a meaningful interaction. Undoubtedly, the concept of communication had to be viewed at many different levels and underlying all this was the fundamental that communication involves many aspects with the ability to listen to the audience and ability to react to the audience identified as key to achieving effective scientific communication.