Thematic Networks Activity Reporting and News Guidelines

Reporting and news stories of your activities published at the UArctic website are important for promotion, communication and outreach of your activities, research results and publications.

Report your activities

Reporting and publishing news of your activities is one of the few responsibilities of UArctic Thematic Networks and Institutes and should thus be a continuous procedure.

UArctic and its Thematic Networks office aim to make this as easy and smooth as possible, as it is their responsibility to support and promote all UArctic Thematic Networks and Institutes. Reporting and sending news to be published at UArctic website keeps your Thematic Network and Institute alive as if nothing is reported or any news published, your network is labelled as passive and will be terminated by UArctic Vice President Networks. Being labelled as passive, in case you are very much alive and active, is not beneficial for you or UArctic as it acts as a negative signal for outsiders and UArctic members, including leaders of your home organization.

In addition for keeping you alive and visible at the UArctic website, all activities are reported to the UArctic Board, and included to annual UArctic President’s report presented to annual Assembly of UArctic. Publicity is increased by publishing the annual activity report in the annual Shared Voices Magazine, which is also printed as hard copies and shared broadly in Arctic events such as ASSW, Arctic Circle Assemblies, Arctic Frontiers, UArctic Congresses etc.

Notable is that funders interested in funding UArctic refer to thematic networks websites as a source of potential donations. This has increased in UArctic through its fundraising activities and is seen to increase.

The online form is easy and quick way to report activities and share news as soon as they have taken place, as you can report the activities with the form either every time something happens or every three months. UArctic uses quarterly reporting, thus your activities are reported to UArctic administration every three months as part of the Thematic Networks office reporting.

Online form is designed also to help the work load of Thematic Networks office as it allows easy uploading of the activities to online reporting database, however this is only possible if form is filled carefully with adequate information.

Please note that possible external funding source/s used for activities reported has been added to the form. With this Thematic Network office doesn’t need to make separate questionnaires of funding.

NOTE: Long narrative reports submitted during the busy period at the end of the year / in January, are not preferred and required as they add extremely work load for Thematic Networks office. This because information from these narrative long reports has to be pulled out manually one by one to the online reporting database used.

Send News Stories

As noted above news stories of your activities published at the UArctic website are important for promotion, communication and outreach of your activities, research results and publications.

This increases public awareness of the Thematic Networks and Institutes, which are of interest to broader public, both by internal UArctic members (including your host organisations) and outside public. And questions such as “do Thematic Networks/Institutes actually do or accomplish anything”, should become history!

News should be submitted with the same online reporting form. News sent via form will be published at the UArctic front page (under News section), linked to your TN or Institute page, and to all UArctic member organisations’ pages tagged in the news. This way a link between TN and Institute partners and their home organisations is visible in both at the UArctic member profile pages and TN/Institute pages. News are also shared on UArctic’s social media channels and newsletters, and links to some of the news are published in the monthly UArctic Member Bulletin.

If your news is urgent call for example and thus needs to be published as soon as possible, please send email to us: thematicnetworks@uarctic.org / heli.niittynen@uarctic.org.

When to report & deadlines (quarterly reporting)

You should always report the activities by using the online reporting form. This can be done continuously or at least quarterly. The quarterly deadlines are set to remind you about your responsibility to report at least every three months: 15th of March, June, September, and December. It is of course best if you report every time something happens. Thematic Networks office has to submit annual reports by the end of January, therefore in January the TN office sends you the lists of activities for you to review and add those possible activities that have not been reported before.

Here are few examples of what is important to report:

  • advertisements and invitations for participants to your TN/Institute event (workshop,
    webinar, conference, meeting)
  • new successful funding received
  • starting / kick-off of a new project (not districted to research, but all kinds of projects
    including community engagement, citizen science etc.)
  • new publication released or published (please remember that you can use Zenodo for
    grey literature)
  • report after an event (how it went, how many participants etc.)
  • planning or starting the enrollment /call for students of a new education program,
    PhD school, field work, summer course etc. Remember to also write a news after the
    e.g. field course or summer school about the results and how all went, how many
    participants etc.

What activities can be reported as Thematic Networks / Institutes activities?

  • Activity that is in line with the theme of your Thematic Network / Institute
  • Activities conducted with members of your Thematic Networks / Institute
  • Report those activities that are conducted during the year of reporting, i.e. you can report activities conducted in 2024.
  • If you are not sure whether to report or not, please don’t hesitate to contact us and
    ask. We also check all the reported activities and will be in contact with you if we need
    further information