Plan communications

8 minutes

Communicating Prosper
Prosper branding
Talking about Prosper
Useful links

Communicating Prosper

Whether you’re looking to run a workshop drawing on a specific Prosper resource, running a full-blown cohort, or simply wanting to signpost Prosper to postdocs at your institution, communication is key.

Here you can find guidance on using the Prosper branding, including branded materials, as well as guidance how to talk about Prosper both to postdocs and other stakeholders and decision-makers within your organisation. You can also find information on communications strategies for your postdoc career development initiatives more broadly – drawing on our own experiences recruiting and running our pilot cohorts.

Prosper branding

Here you can find the basics of the Prosper branding, together with links to high-res artwork and branded materials for you to repurpose.

a. Logos

There are three variants of the Prosper logo – suited to different formats and contexts:

The hi-res and .ai artwork for all these can be downloaded here.

Logo with strapline:

Logo without strapline:

Circular logo (ideal for things where the logo needs to be less prominent, or for usage such as social media profile pictures):

b. Fonts

We use two fonts for all of our collateral and materials:

The official Prosper font – for use in our designed-up materials and in our logo – is the LL Circular family, specifically LL Circular Bold for headings and subheadings, and LL Circular Book for main body text.

However, this is a paid-for font, and we appreciate not everyone has it on their system. Therefore, for the bulk of our communications – we use the similarly-styled Arial font (Bold and Regular).

Both these fonts are clear and simple, in keeping with our commitment to accessibility.

In both cases we typically (on word documents and similar) use 16px for headers/subheadings, and 12px for main body text. However, in the modern multiple-format and web-heavy world, appropriate sizes are often dictated by the format – we generally aim for what looks clear and sensible in the context at hand.

c. Prosper portal QR code

This is our QR code for the Portal. While you’re free to use your own, using this one allows us to track (anonymously!) hit rates.

Download the code here.

d. Iconography

At the heart of the Prosper brand are a set of abstract icon tiles that can be combined as you wish.

We use 84 tiles in total, and these can be downloaded as .ai files here.

However, it is likely more convenient for you to use some of the tile sets we’ve already created and used ourselves, such as the one shown here. You can download the full set here.

As well as our abstract icon tiles, we also have three icons that carry specific meaning – they represent our Reflect, Explore and Act resources respectively:

The colours of these icons are fixed (see section on colour).

e. Colours

With the exception of our iconography, Prosper’s main brand colours are monochrome and greyscale. More precisely, the following shades:

	Primary colour	Primary colour	Supporting colour	Supporting colour
Name	Black	White	Dark grey	Mid grey
RGB	0/0/0	250/250/250	89/89/90	288/232/229
Hex	#000000	#FFFFFF	#59595a	#e4e8e5

We also have three specific coloured shades that we use to theme our Reflect, Explore and Act sections/resources, respectively. The Reflect, Explore and Act icons should always be in the correct shade, and the shade can be used to theme resources more broadly.

Additionally, in the same vein, we have distinct thematic shades for our Managers of Researchers and Institutions sections/resources.

We also use pastel versions of each where appropriate. The RGB and Hex values for all of these are:

	Reflect		Explore		Act
Name	Reflect blue	Reflect background	Explore teal	Explore background	Act purple	Act background
RGB	38/104/173	222/232/243	59/166/166	225/242/242	131/81/160	242/237/245
Hex	#2668AD	#DEE8F3	#3BA6A6	#E1F2F2	#8351A0	#F2EDF5

	Managers of researchers		Institutions
Name	MoRs green	MoRs background	Institutions organge	Institutions background
RGB	202/208/79	244/246/219	234/182/84	251/240/220
Hex	#CAD04F	#F4F6DB	#EAB654	#FBF0DC

f. Branded document templates

We have branded document templates ready-made for you to use within your organisation.

Our branded Powerpoint slide template can be found here.

Our branded Word documents can be found here (portrait) and here (landscape).

g. Creative Commons License

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ .

Guidance for talking about Prosper and postdoc career development

While we certainly wouldn’t want to dictate how other organisations choose to talk about postdoc career development, here are some principles that underpinned our approach during our pilots, and in the creation of the resources here on the portal:

Avoid binaries like ‘academia or industry’ – this binary is too reductive of the options postdocs have. There are many non-academic career pathways available to postdocs that don’t neatly fall under the label of ‘industry’ (for example, many NGOs, third sector, Government roles, academia-adjacent roles, and more). It also shows a bias towards certain predominant pathways (such as Life Sciences à the Pharmaceutical Industry). We generally use the phraseology of ‘within or beyond academia’ or just ‘beyond academia’. This aligns with the term used in the Researcher Development Concordat

Prosper is for all postdocs of any discipline – we have resources for postdocs whose field of study falls within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, just as we have materials of relevance for postdocs in STEM fields.

Prosper is not about pushing postdocs out of academia – rather, it is about furnishing postdocs with the information, skills and resources they need to take control of their careers, and thrive wherever their career may take them. Many of our resources are about non-academic career pathways, as we’ve found this to be a common gap in career development provision – but the point is for postdocs to make more informed and proactive choices and plans about their career. Furthermore, it is increasingly common for individuals to chart career pathways that take them in and out of traditional academia at any given point, and the lines between the two are increasingly blurry given the importance of collaboration and partnership in the modern world. At its heart Prosper is about research culture change, encouraging postdocs to not narrowly define their career success as securing an academic position but value the breadth of career possibilities available to them.

Prosper is not a ‘project’ or a ‘programme’ – it is a model for postdoc career development, and set of interrelated resources for enhancing postdoc career development (which is not to say, of course, that you cannot use Prosper as part of one of your own programmes or projects!).

Useful links

You can get in touch with the Prosper team for general queries by emailing us as prosper.postdoc@liverpool.ac.uk

Our How to Recruit a Cohort page has guidance and materials (at the very bottom) for engaging postdocs within your institution – both for the purposes of running a cohort or more generally for engaging them with Prosper resources.

Our page on Collecting Testimonials and Ambassadors contains guidance on how to use successful (or simply interesting and instructive) postdoc career interventions within your organisation to further promote Prosper and postdoc career development more broadly.

Our Running A Cohort page contains guidance on the logistics and practicalities of engaging postdocs in career development programmes (a Prosper cohort in this case, but much of the advice can be applied more generally), including guidance on communications.

Evaluation of Prosper career development interventions, as well as being useful in and of itself, can go hand-in-hand with your wider communications for the purposes of promoting postdoc career development more broadly. Our Evaluate Your Programme page contains guidance on this and the communications involved in the evaluative process.

For materials that may be of use should you need to ‘sell’ Prosper internally, either to postdocs or other stakeholder within your organisation, see:

Our paper Prosper: A New Model for Postdoc Career Development – outlining the Prosper model and showcasing the impact it had on our pilot participants
Our postdoc case studies, looking at the impact our pilots had on a range of postdocs from different disciplines (our format is a good starting point for producing similar testimonials of your own)