At Smart Venice, we are constantly developing and refining our skills as a team. Being partners in a few project now, we deal a lot with communicating what we do. Research and policies communication is challenging: we start from our work plan and project descriptions where everything is formulated in terms of policy objectives, goals, impact indicators, methodologies and technical tools. Then, we have to let people, our final beneficiaries, our audience, know what is all about in clear and understandable ways. In time of dense and hectic communication flows, we also know how everyone has less and less time and attention to dedicate and therefore paying attention to all communication aspects is extremely important. The H2020 Families Share project was a testbed for us: when presenting the project, we usually referred to work life balance policies, mutual help and shared childcare, social and digital innovation pilots, and we saw our parents’ communities faces looking a bit lost and asking for clarifications. We therefore decided to take action and to rethink our communication strategy starting from putting ourselves into our target groups’ shoes, parents, and to use a visual and verbal language fine tuned with the message we wanted to convey. After from choosing the suitable media for our purposes (animated video and cartoons), we carefully designed the script for the video and re-fined it in several iterative and collaborative cycles, simplyifing the steps of the service we are promoting, and anticipating all main questions and concerns. We also tried to keep it short (that was probably the most challenging part!) and to add a bit of fun. Some of the members of our communities of participants to the project were showed a preliminary version and asked to provide feeback for further improvement.
We think we managed and are happy with the results! We translated the Italian version in English, so that now the entire Families Share consortium has a new communication tool easily shareable on social media, to let parents know and get excited about it! Let us know if you like it and help us to spread the word!
Smart Venice 