Spreading the word about quality infrastructure

Get the message out

Those responsible for quality infrastructure institutions, such as heads of metrology institutes, standardisation institutes and accreditation bodies, face the challenge of disseminating their services beyond the circle of technical experts. They often try to bring the subject closer to their audience with expert lectures full of technical jargon, abbreviations and numbers.

It is not surprising that the audience often hardly understands anything and does not engage further with the topic.

This is regrettable as questions of product quality and safety and protection of the environment and the consumers are of general interest. Suppose the knowledge about the quality infrastructure remains limited to the circle of experts. In this case, it will be difficult for a wider audience of users to open up to the related services. Conversely, suppose the importance of quality infrastructure is widely disseminated and recognised. In that case, a quality culture will develop that contributes to the wellbeing of individuals, enterprises and the society as a whole.

Quality infrastructure institutions have established dedicated communication areas and are continuously improving their public relation efforts

More recently, there have been encouraging developments in communication about quality infrastructure. Many quality infrastructure institutions have established dedicated communication areas and are continuously improving their public relation efforts. In Latin America, for example, we have seen exciting ways of creative information dissemination.

Communicative creativity

One example is the character of SúperAcredita, who, as an ambassador of the National Accreditation Body of Colombia (ONAC) and protector of trust in quality, informs about the accreditation process in a practical way.

The use of the comic character of a Superwoman in short cartoon videos intends to appeal primarily to younger consumers.

As part of a cooperation agreement with Mesopartner, ONAC offers various articles from this QI4D blog translated into Spanish. ONAC provides a monthly webinar on a selected blog post on the platform “Conversations with Ulrich“. With this new format, we can significantly expand the audience.

Starting with simple means

In Myanmar, until recently before the military coup, a Mesopartner consultant commissioned by the PTB, helped the Department of Research and Innovation, which is hosting the fundamental quality infrastructure institutions, to design and publish a quarterly newsletter. A news feed informs about the latest activities, achievements and plans in quality infrastructure and announces important upcoming events. The growing number of recipients includes various quality infrastructure institutions, other government agencies, enterprise managers and owners and development organisations.

Fifth Pilar of Quality Infrastructure

The Caribbean Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality (CROSQ) sees quality promotion as the “latest concept” in the development of quality infrastructure. For CROSQ’s CEO, Mr Deryck Omar, “the sustained marketing and communication of Quality Infrastructure is a driver of trade and economic prosperity for the region to reach all stakeholders, including the media of history. This includes vital aspects of marketing such as public relations, advertising, digital marketing, awareness-raising, and some degree of face-to-face selling of QI-related products and services.” [1]

The premise behind the quality promotion is to drive the development of a quality culture in the region through these efforts, which help raise awareness of QI and sell the services offered in the main pillars of standards, metrology, accreditation and conformity assessment. Quality culture has been defined as “a culture of quality awareness and continuous improvement”. [2]

The quality promotion also includes elements of knowledge management, data management and information technology development. These additional moving parts help develop strategies that facilitate communication and knowledge sharing between QI bodies and the users of their services.

What good examples of creative information transfer on quality infrastructure do you know?

Please share your experiences as a comment below this blog post.

Reference

[1] CROSQ 2020, Quality Promotions, October 19, https://website.crosq.org/quality-promotions/

Feature photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash