When research excellence isn’t enough: Communicating value beyond academia

Excellent research can still be difficult for potential partners, funders, and communities to understand.

In this episode, Kylie Ahern, Founder and CEO of STEM Matters, explains why universities should connect research communication to business objectives, audience questions, and coherent institutional narratives. She also considers how AI can scale storytelling while keeping strategy, judgement, and verification firmly in human hands.

Read the article or listen to our podcast episode episode for Kylie’s perspective on making research impact visible beyond academia:

Also available on:

Summary

Research excellence does not automatically help a potential partner understand why a university’s expertise matters to them. Institutions may publish a steady flow of grants, discoveries, partnerships, and project announcements, yet still leave external audiences without a clear account of the problems they can help solve. Kylie Ahern, Founder and CEO of STEM Matters, sees this gap as a consequence of treating communication as an activity that follows research rather than as a strategic part of creating impact.

Her experience across science publishing and research communication points towards a different model. Universities can begin with their priorities and audiences, decide what they want to be known for, and organise their expertise around the questions people are already asking. This makes communication part of business development: it helps institutions build trust, connect research with external needs, and show the cumulative value created through sustained investment and partnership.

Communication belongs within research strategy

The value of communication becomes clearer when it is connected to the institution’s objectives. Kylie frequently finds that developing a public narrative forces organisations to articulate who they are trying to reach, what they hope to achieve, and why a particular area of work deserves attention. The communication process can therefore expose strategic questions that have not yet been resolved elsewhere.

Communications is not seen as strategic. It’s not seen as a crucial part of business development.

This positioning affects where research communication sits within a university. When it is absorbed into a marketing function focused primarily on student recruitment, its contribution may be measured against objectives that have little to do with research funding, philanthropy, or partnership development. Kylie argues that research communicators should work closely with the people responsible for research and income, with their activity linked to the funding ambitions it is intended to support.

She uses a hypothetical $100 million ask to make the relationship tangible. Securing investment at that scale requires a university to explain what it could accomplish, understand the prospective funder, and present a compelling account of shared value. Every part of the ask depends on effective communication. The same principle applies when an institution wants to deepen a small number of strategically important relationships: the narrative, evidence, and engagement should be designed around those people and organisations.

Communication becomes measurable once the institution defines what it is trying to achieve. Outputs such as news stories or website updates are then assessed according to whether they support the desired relationship, funding pathway, or area of influence.

Audience questions create the foundations for trust

Many university websites still communicate as though journalists were their principal audience. Kylie traces this habit to an earlier media environment, when press releases were the main route from a research institution to the public. Websites made direct communication possible, but the self-promotional format remained: institutions continued to announce what they had invented or achieved instead of answering what external audiences wanted to understand.

What are the things you are constantly asked by people outside research?

That question shaped Kylie’s work with the Queensland Brain Institute. Its researchers had developed an ultrasound device that broke down plaque in the brains of mice and restored memory, attracting substantial global attention. Yet people who visited the institute’s website struggled to understand what the work did, why it mattered, and how it related to the broader research programme. The visibility of the discovery did not translate into a comparable philanthropic response.

Researchers identified the recurring questions they received about topics including concussion, dementia, and artificial intelligence. The institute then built web and print content around those questions, making its expertise more useful and accessible to people looking for credible information. The head of philanthropy and the head of communications incorporated the approach into their work rather than treating the content as a one-off project.

Kylie says the strategy contributed to an additional $30 million in philanthropic donations. Its strength came from more than explaining a single outcome. By becoming a dependable destination for knowledge about the brain, the institute gave audiences repeated reasons to trust its expertise and understand the context in which individual discoveries sat.

A clear institutional narrative is stronger than constant news

Universities have no shortage of material to publish. The difficulty lies in choosing which activity contributes to a meaningful external narrative. Communications teams face requests to announce each grant, survey, appointment, partnership, and discovery, producing a crowded stream in which the institution’s most important areas of value can become harder to see.

You need to have the courage to say less. What do we wanna be known for?

For Kylie, the answer should shape the institution’s main communication channels. She points to topic-led web publishing that helps an audience understand an area such as quantum research, while weaving in researchers, stories, community effects, and future possibilities. News remains available, but it no longer determines the structure of the institution’s public identity.

The same discipline is needed when communicating impact. Individual stories are often presented as narrow slices: a project produces an outcome, receives an award, or secures a partnership. Universities can make their contribution clearer by connecting those examples to a larger account of their influence in fields such as medical research, digital agriculture, or cardiovascular health.

That narrative should explain what the institution has achieved, what it has invested, which partners made the work possible, and where the field is heading. It also allows universities to recognise the contribution of collaborators rather than presenting impact as an isolated institutional success. Over time, the combined story shows how fundamental research, applied work, infrastructure, talent, and external partnerships have changed lives.

AI can scale the stories that communicators cannot reach

The need for research storytelling often exceeds the capacity available. Kylie has worked with an organisation where two communicators supported 4,000 researchers. Even talented teams cannot interview and develop usable profiles, biographies, and impact case studies for everyone under those conditions. Researchers remain without material they can use, while communicators have fewer stories to support wider campaigns and relationships.

Kylie Bot was developed to address that scale problem. The tool conducts a verbal interview based on Kylie’s questioning approach, then produces content for general audiences, including researcher profiles, biographies, impact case studies, and broader impact narratives. Researchers can speak about their work rather than type responses, while also practising how they pitch its purpose and value.

Testing has shown that 45 minutes is a useful interview length, although some researchers speak for up to 90 minutes. Draft content can be generated within ten minutes and then reviewed, refined, and checked with the researcher. The material gives communications teams a starting point they can adapt into articles, web profiles, grant narratives, or other creative formats.

You cannot take the human out of the loop.

Kylie sees AI as a way to extend access to storytelling, while preserving the strategic and editorial work people perform. The technology can follow an established route more quickly; humans still decide which route matters, assess the narrative, confirm accuracy, and build relationships around it. This distinction keeps scale from becoming another source of undirected content.

Funding priorities provide a practical place to begin

For institutions at the beginning of this work, Kylie recommends starting with the research areas where additional funding matters most. That focus gives communication a concrete purpose and immediately connects it to colleagues in research leadership, philanthropy, and business development.

The first questions are direct: what are the organisation’s business objectives, who are the audiences connected to them, and what do those audiences need to understand? Communicators can then identify the evidence, stories, and expertise that will help build a relationship or support an investment decision. This approach also provides a basis for deciding what to leave out.

If communications isn’t supporting it, then it’s vanity communications. It’s not the right type of communications.

Strategic communication cannot compensate for weak research or partnerships, but it determines whether external audiences can recognise their value and see a way to participate. Kylie Ahern’s approach asks universities to make deliberate choices about the impact they want to claim, the people they need to reach, and the trust they must earn along the way.

Ready for more?

Future-ready universities do more than generate knowledge. They create the conditions for that knowledge to be applied, shared and translated into meaningful societal impact.

• How to create value from your research: A guide to research valorisation explores how researchers and universities can extend the reach of their work beyond academia and create social, economic, cultural and environmental value through research impact and knowledge valorisation.
• More than commercialisation: Understanding university engagement examines how universities contribute to society through a wide range of engagement activities, highlighting the role of knowledge transfer, partnerships and valorisation in creating long-term impact beyond traditional commercial outcomes.

Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!