Automation and tools for efficient outreach

Communication work expands to fill all the time you give it – and in a Node, you rarely have much to give. The point of automation is not to do more; it’s to spend the time you have on the things that actually need a human (judgement, relationships, good content) and let tools handle the repetitive rest.

This is not a comprehensive tools course. It’s a short set of free options that save real time once set up. Don’t try to adopt all of them – pick one or two and start there.

Start with what other Nodes use

Before you pick a tool, see what’s already working elsewhere. The ELIXIR Communications Group keeps a shared spreadsheet of the tools Nodes use for communications – and which Node uses what – so you can ask someone who has already set it up.

It lists around fifty tools – for graphics, video, newsletters, metrics, websites and project management – with whether each is free, freemium or paid, what it’s used for and which Nodes use it. Found a tool that works for you? Add it, so the next Node doesn’t start from scratch.

Communication tools used by ELIXIR Nodes (Google Sheet)

Schedule social media in batches

The single biggest time saver. Instead of logging in to post every day, write a week or a month of posts in one sitting and schedule them. Buffer is simple, free and enough for most Nodes.

Why it helps:

• Consistency – your channels stay active even in busy weeks.
• Batching – writing ten posts at once is far faster than ten posts on ten days.
• Timing – schedule for when your audience is actually online (see below).

Find your own best times. Generic “best time to post” guides are a starting point, but trends in your sector and audience matter more – researchers don’t keep the same hours as consumer audiences. Treat timing as a small experiment: post the same or similar stories (two course announcements, say) on different days and at different times, and compare how they did (see Reading your numbers). Only change the timing; if the stories differ too much, you won’t know what made the difference. After a few rounds you’ll know when your audience is listening.

Coordinate with the Hub’s social media calendar where you can (see Chapter 4: ELIXIR communications ecosystem). Posting on the same day as a consortium-wide push, and tagging other Nodes, multiplies reach for the same effort.

Get updates delivered to Slack

Instead of checking five websites for news, let the information come to you. Most ELIXIR sources publish a feed, and Slack can post each new item into a channel automatically – new training on TeSS, ELIXIR news, new jobs.

The easy way: RSS feeds

Slack’s RSS app posts new items from a feed into any channel. Once your workspace admin has added the app, type this in the channel:

/feed subscribe https://tess.elixir-europe.org/events.rss?country=Belgium

Feeds worth subscribing to:

TeSS also gives you a calendar feed – https://tess.elixir-europe.org/events.ics, with the same filters – that you can add to Outlook or Google Calendar.

Feed your newsletter from TeSS

The same feeds can do the legwork for your newsletter’s “upcoming training” section:

• TeSS email digests – save a search on TeSS (your country, or a topic) and subscribe to it: TeSS emails you the new events daily, weekly or monthly. See Subscribing to notifications in the TeSS documentation.
• A weekly digest with Zapier – Zapier’s RSS digest template collects new items from several feeds (TeSS training, ELIXIR news, ELIXIR jobs) and sends you one message a week – your newsletter shortlist, ready when you sit down to write.
• Live listings on your website – the TeSS widgets show an always-up-to-date list of TeSS events on your Node’s site. See Code and data for developers.

When there’s no feed: Zapier, Make or Google Apps Script

For anything without a feed – a new sign-up in your Node’s registration form, a new row in a shared sheet, a new registration for an event – a small automation can post it to Slack for you:

• Zapier or Make – point and click, no code: pick a trigger (“new form response”, “new row”, “new item in feed”) and an action (“send a Slack message”). Their free plans cover a few simple workflows.
• Google Apps Script – free and built into Google Forms and Sheets, but it means writing code. If you’re not comfortable with that, ask your Node’s software engineer or research computing team to set it up with you.

Slack receives these messages through an incoming webhook: a private web address your workspace admin can create for one channel.

Automated reporting

If you measure your communications (and you should – it’s how you prove impact), don’t pull the numbers by hand every month. Set up a Google Analytics dashboard once to track website traffic, then check or share it whenever you need to.

To get started, follow Google’s guide Set up Analytics for a website: you create an account and a property, then add a small tracking code to your site – most website systems (WordPress, Drupal) have a field or plugin for it. Prefer not to use Google? Matomo is a free, self-hosted alternative some Nodes already use.

Set it up to answer the questions you actually care about: which pages get visited, where visitors come from and what they do next – not every metric available. Chapter 10 walks through what to look at, with examples.

The one-hour automation starter kit

You can put the essentials in place in about an hour. Tick them off as you go:

• Connect one social scheduler (Buffer is the quickest start) and schedule a week of posts.
• Subscribe a Slack channel to the TeSS events feed for your country, and to ELIXIR jobs.
• Add your Node’s tools to the Communication tools used by ELIXIR Nodes sheet.
• Set up a Google Analytics dashboard for your main site or pages.
• Save all the tool logins somewhere your team can find them – automation only helps if it outlives one person.

Further resources