Periodic report on Communication, Dissemination & Exploitation

This document is the mid-term dissemination, communication and exploitation report of project COURAGEOUS. In this report, we summarise:
● The communication and dissemination activities performed during the first 21 months of Project COURAGEOUS,
● The outreach of the communication channels utilised to promote Project COURAGEOUS
INTERPOL manages dissemination and communication activities (WP6), and Project COURAGEOUS partners are also tasked with promoting and raising awareness within existing networks, sharing project progress and information in their own communication channels.
The Project COURAGEOUS aims to realise and sustain the goals and perspectives defined in the “D6.1 Dissemination and communication plan”. To this end, we find it very important to have a clear picture of the current status of the project’s visibility.
We carried out a two-way approach in this evaluation process. On the one hand, we examined the statistics of each communication channel using the analytics of the platforms. On the other hand, we approached:
(1) our partners of Project COURAGEOUS, and
(2) the associated stakeholders as focus groups.
The findings of this evaluation process show that a high number of communication and dissemination activities were performed mostly virtually due to the project starting during COVID-19 pandemic. Project OCURAGEOUS gained a global awareness due to presentations and associated events that were held virtually where the audience were either a regional or global audience. These involve online events, personal panel presentations, LinkedIn and Twitter posts as the most preferred online channels. Based on the results, we can state that outreach of the communication channels did reach the pre-set goals identified in “D6.1 Dissemination and communication plan”.
After thorough analysis, WP6 summarised some conclusions on how to tailor the communication and dissemination activities in the second part of the project. Among the conclusions, we can highlight more effort needs to be made to communicate Project COURAGEOUS through the LinkedIn group and Twitter channels and that when the testing events are taking place that these should be used to maximise the visibility and awareness around Project COURAGEOUS and its deliverables.