Abstract
The EO4EU project aims at expanding access to a wider audience and improving the usability of data generated by EO service providers. To achieve this goal, the platform will leverage machine learning, cloud services, and pre-exascale high-performance computing (see 4 Assets and Value Proposition). An essential step will be the communications and dissemination strategy aimed at guaranteeing a significant uptake of the developed solution.
The overarching dissemination and communication goal is to ensure the maximum uptake and adoption of the project’s results. Two communications and dissemination objectives to enable this are (1) to increase the relevance of the project’s value proposition and (2) improve the user journey toward conversion. The latter will consider three stages of the user journey, namely the awareness, considerations, and decision stages. This will allow to consistently target the audience in the communications and dissemination activities, thereby providing them a smooth transition from getting acquainted with the EO4EU platform to becoming users (see 2 Dissemination and Communication Objectives.
The communications and dissemination activities will target each of the identified stakeholder groups which include EO data providers, private sector, researchers and academia, policy makers, citizens and general public (see 3 Stakeholder Analysis). To ensure sufficient result exploitation, the applied methodology will include the generation of relevant content for each stakeholder group and their engagement as community members. Some of the tools that will be used include newsletters,social media schedulers, event tools, webinar videoconferencing tools, and event platforms. An approval procedure for materials considered of high importance by WP6 will be set up (see 5.2 Approval Structure). Additionally, the results of the communications activities will be continuously monitored by such tracking tools as Google Analytics and the Drupal content management tracker, among others (see 5.3 Monitoring).
The communications and dissemination strategy will be multi-channel and consist of horizontal activities, as well as a set of targeted campaigns (see 6 Communication and Dissemination Plan). The channels for horizontal activities will include the support of the website with an overview of the EO4EU functionalities and social media and content repositories. As part of the content production, the plan envisions the creation of a product brochure, a set of use case flyers, and a policy brief.
Additionally, a video documentary series, a quarterly newsletter, press releases, and third-party coverage will ensure a multi-media approach to dissemination. Concurrently, EO4EU will organise at least eight webinars, which will include both technical and non-technical webinars, as well as a set of workshops.
It is planned to implement four communications campaigns (see 6.3 Campaigns). The Community Building and Awareness campaign will aim at building the EO4EU Community Database. The EO Innovation Award campaign will promote the EO4EU platform to a wider audience. Next, the Technical Outputs Dissemination campaign will aim at directly promoting the project’s specific outputs to their target audiences. Finally, the EO4EU Platform Promotion campaign will demonstrate the features and use cases, thereby leading to further engagement and transition from “visitor” to “user”. This plan has already been piloted and some early results were already seen (see 7 Early results and next steps).