Impact - 2.2 Measure to maximise impact: Communication

This chapter is divided to two sections:

1. Dissemination and exploitation of results
2. Communication activities

There's often some overlap between between dissemination, exploitation and communication, especially for close-to-market projects.

Dissemination means sharing research results with potential users - peers in the research field, industry, other commercial players and policymakers. By sharing your research results with the rest of the scientific community, you are contributing to the progress of science in general.

Whereas exploitation is the use of results for commercial purposes or in public policymaking.

Communication is the activities you do during the project lifetime to promote your project and its results.

Instructions

You must promote the action and results of your project. You do this by providing targeted information to multiple audiences (including the media and the public), in a strategic and effective manner and possibly engaging in a two-way exchange.

The communication activities must be strategically planned and implemented from the beginning of the project.

They must be based on a comprehensive communication plan with clear objectives and concrete plans for communication activities. Communication activities should be able to convey research in a non-technical way to different groups of people, also beyond the project consortium’s community. You should include a description of each activity, its target audience, and its timing. Be clear with which channels you will be using, and use several. It is good if you can identify KPI numbers on how you consider each action a success.

All proposals must include a work package in the Implementation section that contains the communication activities you define here to be carried out during the action (or the communication activities have to be a task in another work package).

Write out your plan clearly identifying all your target audiences, with stakeholders identified and oversight of the activity and responsibilities. If you are decide to not communicate to an audience, explain very clearly your reasoning to this omission. You can include a table that lists all the required information.

Example

Communication plan

A devoted and detailed communication strategy of the project will be done in the first two months of the project, which shall include a wide range of activities mostly revolving around social media. Communication materials will be created to support the activities. These include e.g. a project logo, press release template and a project website.

etc.

The WIDGET consortium has defined a comprehensive and dedicated Communication Strategy for promoting the project and its results beyond the project’s own community, envisaging a broad reach, by taking strategic and targeted measures for communicating about the project itself and its results to a multitude of audiences, including the media, and engaging a two-way exchange.

Individual Communication and Dissemination plans