Asked for broader impacts. Handed a template and a deadline.
Your proposal needs a public or policy engagement that reviewers believe. Your project needs to reach the people it is meant to serve. The instruction to engage rarely comes with a method, so most teams bolt a one-time booth or a talk onto work that was never framed for it, and it fades the week after.
Generic engagement does not hold, and it does not read as credible on the page. What lasts is an engagement that could only come from your research and the specific change you want it to make. That is the part almost no program helps you design.
We design your engagement with you, from your science out.
STEMsaic Portal designs unique, participatory engagements that bring research direct to public and policy audiences, the way the microPlastics DJ and Protein Pinball did. We start from your research and the result you want, then design an experience the public can actually do, scoped to your resources, your capacity, and the circumstances you work in.
Because the work is tied to your grant or project development, the engagement you leave with is one you can name in a broader-impacts narrative and run for real. We bring the method and the support. You bring the science and the local resources. Together that becomes your own version of a microPlastics DJ moment.
A short call, then a plan made for your team.
We learn your research, the change you want it to make, the resources you have, and your proposal or project timeline. Short, focused, and free, so we can both tell whether this is a fit.
We come back with a concept direction and the mode that fits, with a clear quote. From here the work is paid, and you know exactly what you are getting before anything begins.
A facilitated design sprint, coaching, or a live working session where your team builds the engagement concept with us in real time, grounded in the Portal to the Public method.
You leave with an engagement you can run, a plan to sustain it, and language ready for your broader-impacts narrative. Built from your work, not borrowed from a template.
Three modes. One that fits your stage and budget.
Ranges below are a ballpark to help you self-qualify. The exact figure is scoped to your project and settled on the call, so you only pay for the support you need.
We hand your team the engagement-design canvas and the Portal method, with focused coaching, so you design and run the piece with your own local resources.
We co-design the engagement concept with your team across working sessions, from the research idea to a concrete, fundable plan you can put in front of reviewers.
We help build the experience itself, microPlastics DJ style, so your team walks away with a finished, playable engagement and the know-how to keep running it.
Portal to the Public is a national framework for public engagement with science. STEMsaic Portal is informed by it and trained through it. It is not the network itself, and STEMsaic does not speak for it.
The Portal to the Public (PoP) Network is facilitated by the Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI), a partner on the original National Science Foundation grant that developed the framework. The strength of this work is the network and the many member organizations that practice and advance it. STEMsaic is proud to be one trained voice within it.
Visit the Portal to the Public Network →STEMsaic Portal is led by Travis Tangen, who helped bring this work to UW-Madison and now carries it forward.
A certified Portal to the Public facilitator who co-founded UW-Madison's Portal to the Public chapter, the Wisconsin Idea STEM Fellows program, with two colleagues, drawing on methods refined across the network over many years.
He built that program as Research Impacts Director at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery (WARF), running public engagement at institutional scale.
As his co-founders moved on to other ventures or retired, Travis became the only active certified member carrying the methodology forward. STEMsaic Portal keeps that program's momentum moving, supporting the broader mission of the Portal to the Public Network with the talent and collaborative energy that STEMsaic brings together.
The microPlastics DJ.
A NOAA-funded microplastics study became an engagement the public could feel, turning real Raman spectra into a sound experience anyone can mix. It is the method made tangible: rigorous research, in public, on the ear. Your version will look nothing like it, and that is the point. It will come from your science.
