Stop Disseminating

At last we need to stop just promoting info about our project without being aware that we are listened.

• How many newsletters and campaign emails are sent by european projects that are never read or even worse there is no any sign of action from the recipient?
• How many visit our project website but we don’t know who they are, what they like to see and how engaged they are?
• How many projects start without a clear dissemination (or even better, communication) strategy?

In order to answer the above questions and many others, you can check by yourself a sample of previously funded projects and you will realise that almost 9 out of 10 are unable to answer adequately any of the above questions.

Start Communicating

The only solution to this problem is to define a well structured, comprehensive and effective communication strategy and prepare it at the very beginning of any european funded project.  This strategy will plan in a tabular format all dissemination activities. Any strategy in order to be successful should be clear, concise, coherent and complete. Therefore the following information will be prepared and presented in a table that will be continually updated:

1. What should we disseminate? E.g. Project expectations, project results, project achievements, lessons learnt, etc
2. Who is expected to benefit? i.e. for each of the above elements to be disseminated, who will benefit (inside or outside the construction industry)
3. How/What will be the methods for reaching each of the identified target groups above? E.g. Website, email campaign, social media such as linkedin and facebook page, Newsletters, workshops, events and press-conferences, press-releases, dissemination material such as leaflet, campaigns, awards, personal meetings with key stakeholders and related European associations, follow-ups over the phone, participation in exhibitions, etc.
4. When –Indicative dates that each dissemination activity/method above will take place. This will be linked also with the completion date of each deliverable
5. How Far – Which is the dissemination level? For each of the dissemination activities above/methods, we will specify whether we go at international, European, national or local level?
6. By whom – Who will be responsible? Again for each of the dissemination activities defined above, we will specify who will be responsible (e.g. the Coordinator, the dissemination manager, a specific partner etc)
7. How much? For each of the dissemination activities, we will specify the resources needed (person effort, budget for other costs, etc) and since attention to the budget is a key factor for ensuring a cost-effective dissemination strategy, we will specify also the priority level (high priority, medium priority, low priority) for each dissemination activity/method.
8. How well – Performance indicators on dissemination? Any strategy in order to be effective, it should have some milestones to allow assessing its performance at specific time intervals. Therefore, for each dissemination activity, we will identify and specify specific performance targets that we expect to achieve through our dissemination strategy, e.g minimum no. of web site visits and deliverable downloads at specific time instances, min number of our newsletter subscribers, min. participants in our workshops, etc.

Have you tried something similar or any other way to define your dissemination strategy that really worked? Please share your views below

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