Building impact for EU-Funded initiatives with Communication and Dissemination activities

Starting already with the H2020 programme, we’ve seen a turn among the mandatory requirements for EU-funded projects, where more concrete measures need to be set in place to ensure the research outcomes receive visibility. So serious EU funding authorities are, that they dedicated a section stipulating the legal obligation to implement communication and dissemination activities. You can find it under Art. 17 of your Horizon Europe Grant Agreement form. But beyond fulfilling legal obligations, communication and dissemination should always follow your research project, ensuring its results reach a wider audience, opening channels for further collaboration and exploitation. So what steps you usually follow from  building awareness to disseminating results and later exploiting them?

Communication vs dissemination. Different but complementary

As communication and dissemination consultants with a portfolio of more then 15 projects, we have often received the following question: “What’s the difference between communication and dissemination?”. While communication and dissemination have distinct objectives, they are rather treated within a complementary framework, where communication raises awareness and generates interest among stakeholders, thus facilitating a successful dissemination of project’s outcomes. Vice-versa, disseminating results and making them widely available strengthens the project’s visibility and credibility, thereby supporting the communication efforts.

Plan. Execute. Measure. Adapt

Let’s bust a myth: communication and dissemination activities aren’t just about ticking boxes or fulfilling mandatory “chores” for EU funding beneficiaries. They’re an integral part of your research journey, designed to help your project gain visibility, foster collaboration and ultimately drive impact. Outreach first builds awareness, then discloses results and findings to a well-established community built through communication channels; and finally reaches out to identified stakeholders who could benefit from the R&I results. This is why communication and dissemination personnel need to follow the project and intensify activities when the outcomes request it.

Any communication and dissemination plan begins with establishing the objectives. In other words, ‘What do you want to achieve with your communication activities?”. Your objectives need to be aligned with the scope of the project. If your project is addressing matters of European highly confidential interest, your ‘voice’ will be quite low, understanding that disclosing results could create more damage to your project than impact.

In all the other cases, where R&I requires visibility, we think breaking down communication and dissemination main objectives into three main categories creates clarity:

1. Create awareness. Share publicly available information about your project.
2. Exchange knowledge.
3. Promote results towards your target audience categories.

This structure can be extremely versatile and each project, depending on its nature and intensions, can further detail into specific objectives: increase the awareness of your research topic among policymakers, improve the uptake of your recommendations by peers and other practitioners, intensify the public engagement with your research findings etc.

Besides a structure to keep beneficiaries aligned and composed throughout the project, the communication and dissemination plan will help you identify your key messages, the target groups and the communication channels.

One more time, we simplified all these:

Target audiences ➡️Who do you want to influence, inform or engage into discussions with? What are their needs, motivations and challenges?

Key messages ➡️ What would you like your target audiences to know about you?

Channels ➡️ How will you carry out the communication and dissemination strategy?

Target audiences for communication and dissemination. Meet them where they are

• Who will benefit from your research results in practice?
• Where do you reach them?
• What are their key needs, motivations and challenges?

These are a few questions you may ask to find your audience categories. It is important that you narrow down the audience to ensure messages are crafted to each audience. Our experiences have shown us that running a stakeholder analysis tool or personas to segment and prioritise audiences has a better return on investment.

Your audience may be the fellow researchers in your field, companies, investors, standardisation bodies, NGOs, the education sector, the press or even the public sector. If your communication and dissemination strategy is an afterthought, you may miss the chance to find the right timing and context to meet them.

Key messages

Once you have identified your audiences, you need to develop your key messages and narratives. Asking a few questions proved always to be a reliable source of inspiration:

• What is the motivation of your project?
• What are the main findings expected from your research and what would be their main implications?
• Why are they important or relevant for your audience?

Communication and dissemination channels: How do you deliver the messages?

Today we are spoiled with various communication channels, but less attention span from your audience. It seems to be a trend that favours short bits of information and creative presentation. A well-crafted tweet or a thought-provoking infographic can often have more impact than a lengthy article, especially when targeting busy decision-makers or stakeholders with limited time.

Selecting your channels and choosing the right format of your message should strike a balance. You may use a combination of channels and platforms, from blogs, journals, briefs, to video, podcast, webinars, newsletters, social media etc. Once you selected your channels matrix, prepare your dissemination material and adapt them to your audience groups. Here’s a list of various materials working well with the audiences of our R&I projects: website, articles, interviews, posters and factsheets, videos and animations, events, joint awareness campaigns etc.

A plan is a plan until it changes

Sometimes plans don’t work out according to our estimations. For this reason, we always establish performance indicators and monitor their achievement status during the project. This is why starting off working with communication and dissemination activities requires flexibility and creativity to accept setbacks and find solutions to improve your outreach. When the research topic is less attractive and therefore more difficult to communicate, we try to guide our actions by five principles:

• Simplify the message. Or write with the eraser. Sometimes focusing on a single piece of information at a time brings more impact than packing everything in one communication. Rather than trying to explain all findings at once, perhaps you can focus on one core take-away – such as the anticipated impact of your research on a specific industry or policy topic.
• Avoid the jargon even if your audience consists mainly of experts.
• Communicate messages that are relevant to your audience. Start, for instance, with the problem that you’re solving and explain the impact of your research.
• Communicate in an ‘opportunist’ manner. Find relevant topics, trends, events, campaigns and create links with your own research.
• Create contact networks and benefit from mutual promotion.

We have also become increasingly sensitive to the idea that dissemination continues well beyond the development of dissemination products. It always pays to see the bigger picture, where effective communication and dissemination set the stage for successful exploitation. By reaching the right stakeholders and audiences early on, your project can create opportunities for later commercial, societal and, why not, political applications of its results.

*For EU-funded projects, the European Commission has made available a set of tools to communicate, disseminate and exploit the research results that are free of charge: