WP 8 - Dissemination and Communication

Carefully planned media strategies are instrumental to achieving our communication objectives and reaching out to our intended audiences at EU and local levels. To achieve this, we believe that building a trusting relationship with the media is essential. In the Media Plan, we have developed a strategic process to develop and implement effective media relations strategies, paying close attention to the media to see where to focus attention. This strategic approach relies on several steps: research, identification of media, message development, preparation of a media toolkit, and the definition of best momentum for our activities.

We will build stories for media around SPARCS key milestones, solutions, pilots and mayor profiles to excite the interest of journalists to publish information on these interesting cases. At the same time, we will strive to create a trusting relationship with the media, so as to fully benefit from their presence online, both at the EU level as well as at regional and national level through the cities or multipliers. We also foresee the distribution of press releases at key project milestones, regularly reaching out to journalists on Twitter and engaging with them in specialised smart city-related conversations.