It only feels like 5 minutes ago that we were celebrating ADS being 5 years old, and suddenly we’re 10!! How did that happen? To celebrate we thought we’d have a bit of a look back over the amount of work we’ve done since May 2009.
Our work
We’ve been rather busy over the last 10 years carrying out lots of research projects, evaluations and consultancy activities. Some of our projects have been relatively short-term lasting a few months, while others have spanned many years. Nothing like a bit of variety to keep you on your toes!
Once a project is finished, our work doesn’t end though. We want people to know what we’ve found and get our work out there. After all, putting research into practice is what we’re about. To that end, it’s perhaps no surprise that we’ve done a lot of different activities to share our knowledge, including presentations, workshops, posters, journal articles, books, book chapters and events. Spread the word!
Our research also feeds into our wider knowledge exchange activities, ensuring that the research and education aspects of our work are closely linked. Our education team has worked tirelessly, and looking at some of the figures relating to our education and training, it’s not hard to understand why. We’ve reached a lot of course participants within a variety of different organisations right across the country. We’re even starting to venture abroad with our teaching, which is highly exciting – well, for those who get to go anyway! (only joking, we’re not jealous, honest!)
We’ve provided education ranging from one-day awareness courses, Masterclasses and Workshops through to specialist and leadership courses with multiple days spread across a number of months. Our action learning approach for our longer courses (where we get participants to put the learning into practice between training days) seems to have gone down well, and across all our courses we’re very proud to say that 99.6% of respondents would recommend our courses to other people.
Social media
We’ve also put effort into using less formal ways to engage with you lovely people. Our Facebook page and twitter account are doing well, and we’re not doing too badly in terms of blogs. As well as writing for this blog we’ve got our own Meeting Centre and SCI-Dem blogs on the go. We also write blog posts for other sites, and the infographic below is probably already out of date!
International work
We might be based in Worcester, but we’ve done more than our share of work in different countries. As well as getting to present in some great places (although the inside of a conference centre is pretty similar wherever you go!), we’ve also worked on international projects such as MeetingDem and ALCOVE. On top of that we’ve hosted a few visitors to either help us with specific work or as part of their own research activities. It’s always great getting different perspectives and finding out what goes on across the world.
About us
Over the past ten years we’ve been lucky enough to work with many wonderful groups, but while people may have come and gone, our ADS ‘family’ has always been at the heart of things. We’ve also seen many happy occasions, including PhD graduations, weddings, and births. To be fair we don’t normally need a reason to have cake, but it always tastes a bit better when you’re celebrating something special.
So thank you for joining us for our look back over the past 10 years. Here’s to many more to come!
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