Beneficiaries of Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 funding must carry out activities to increase the impact of their project results. A clear and concise communication and dissemination strategy is therewith crucial to effectively communicate your project´s outcomes to stakeholders and your target group. The objective is to clarify the terms communication, dissemination and exploitation of results, as well as to define activities that will multiply the impact in your specific field.

Your communication and dissemination strategy aims at laying the foundation for a regular flow of information within the consortium partners, and the use of highly established networks as well as engaging stakeholders. It will serve as a framework reference to evaluate the progress through constantly monitoring dissemination activities and keeping track of the achievements. This applies to the different communication channels and measures for a successful project communication as well as to ongoing dissemination activities.

Promotion of the project results

It might be helpful to give the official definition of the results of your EU project, before starting to talk about promotion, marketing, and awareness raising. The official glossary of the EC gives a helpful definition, that results of an EU project are any tangible output of the action, such as data, knowledge, information whatever their form or nature, whether or not they can be protected.

Barriers on the way to effective communication and dissemination

Applicants quite often underestimate the importance of demonstrating a clear, even preliminary, plan for the above concepts when submitting an EU proposal. The main reasons for this are:

• Focusing on implementing and validating technical objectives, as they often wrongly consider that working on these concepts (especially exploitation) is still too early (this is a common practise for programmes with lower starting Technological Readiness Level, TRL).
• Limited considerations of what can be valuable key results of the project and/or lack of interest from the partners to consider the value and potential unique selling points (USPs) of the key results outside their own (commercial, academic) communities.
• Unclear or imprecise perception of the difference between communication, dissemination, and exploitation.
• Lack of reflection and joint discussions within the consortia in collaborative projects

Communication activities for a Horizon Europe project

Your individual communication plan will highly depend on the nature of the final outputs of your specific EU project. It shall be based on strategic and targeted measures for the actual promotion of the project and its results to serve multiple target groups, including the media industry and the general public. Some major communication activities in your project could e.g., be:

• Scientific and Technical Publications
• Dissemination Material
• Synergies & Networking Activities
• Social Media Channels

Be aware that your submitted dissemination and exploitation plan is not the final one! EU projects are very dynamic, taking into account the development and progress that takes time between the applicant´s submission for the EU grant, the actual implementation of the project, the submission of your plan and eventually the completion of the project. In this sense, your communication and dissemination plan is rather a living document that should be updated continuously.