What does it mean to communicate the impact of a project? How do you go beyond merely sharing progress updates and, instead, really focusing on highlighting the tangible and intangible changes brought about by the NRENs? But different audiences also call for different messages and approaches. How to go about it?
These and many other questions about project communications is what the marketing and communications experts of the Special Interest Group, SIG-Marcomms, discussed at the online meeting on October 5, 2023.
A total of 34 participants joined both online and from Asnet-Am’s office premises in Yerevan, Armenia – where they attended just the day before the EaPConnect project meeting.
It was very interesting to hear about regional and national approaches to project communications from the NRENs. Naira Kocharyan from the Armenian NREN presented on the teamwork and capacity and skill building activities that have empowered the international marcomms team behind the project. A truly inspiring list of events and training courses from which the marcomms colleagues have learned a lot and keep applying those skills to the project as well and their respective national efforts.
Another presentation was the one delivered by Tetiana Preobrazhenska from URAN, the Ukranian NREN. The magnitude of her team’s resilience throughout the war and their commitment to keep delivering essential services to their community is not only heartening but also inspirational.
The meeting also featured several presentations on how to engage with different project’s stakeholders and audiences. Lonneke Walk from SURF shared her team’s approach to stakeholder identification and comms strategy development, a very useful tool that can be replicated by other teams and NRENs. Similarly, GRENA, RENAM, RedCLARA, GRNET and the GÉANT Cloud team shared insights into how they convey outcomes and impacts to different audiences in a number of international projects the NRENs contribute to.
Before breaking for lunch, the meeting participants had the chance to answer a few questions on the ever-evolving social media landscape in our community. The same survey was conducted just a few months ago at the Spring meeting in Kajaani, Finland. The survey gathered interesting insights into the latest trends with LinkedIn being on the rise and identified as the most important social media across most of the respondents and X (previously known as Twitter) losing its appeal. With social media being an integral part of most of NRENs’ communications strategy, it is crucial to understand trends and preferences to make decisions as a community and centralise our efforts.
Overall, an insightful and engaging meeting where tips, lessons learned and useful strategies were shared. The dates and location of the Spring meeting will be announced soon.
All slides from this online meeting are uploaded on our new community’s repository, Zenodo.
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