Fairs and other events

Summary

The ENRD CP representatives participated in the event on communication, which was co-organised by four European Commission Directorates-General that together manage a very significant part of the EU budget: Agriculture and Rural Development, Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries and Regional Policy. The main focus of the event was: how to better tell the story of Europe, through its achievements on the ground via the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development, as well as through the other European Structural and Investment Funds.

Please see the key learnings and visual "proceedings" of this event

Outcomes

This “Telling the Story” conference looked at more effective ways to collectively communicate and encourage mutual learning. This was a key moment, as a new programming period of seven years for the EU’s Structural and Investment Funds is about to begin.

Around 600 participants from all 28 EU Member States attended the event which had been conceived for all participants to interact and contribute as much as possible in particular topical workshops allowed participants to engage in conversations in smaller groups. The ENRD CP representative supported the one of the workshops on “Getting the most out of communication networks (EDIC, COMM REPs, RegioNetwork, national comm. Networks”).
Please see the ENRD presentation [PDF ]

The ENRD CP representatives also attended selected workshops for example:

Workshop on Communicating Community-led local development

The main objective of the workshop was to discuss how to communicate the CLLD in a simple way and to share some relevant practices on communicating local development in the framework of the RDP and ENRD. Speakers at the workshop

• Thomas Muller, LAG, Austria shared a vision on how and what should be communicated in a simple way - CLLD highlighting that messages should be tailored to different levels, the LAG team needs to explain and be clear with their role as facilitators, that technical information about funding should give way to information on why this is done and what it achieves.
• Reinhard Fischer, Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, Berlin, Germany talked about Communicating Berlin’s Neighbourhood Management Scheme which as an approach is similar to CLLD. Communication strategy included different groups targeted with different messages to achieve specific goals for politicians to support, for residents to participate and tax payers to be convinced of the effect, etc. The communication goals required different and diverse communication channels and tools
• Jyostna Patel, European Association for Information on Local Development (AEIDL), expert, Belgium talked about Communicating the benefits of an Integrated Territorial Approach: lessons from the Choices programme, Portugal. The basic principle of the program was that young people have the resources to face their own challenges.

In the discussion that followed some of the following messages emerged:

• Need for managing authorities to be present at the local community
• Creating and sharing of videos is powerful
• Local people (peers) is one of the most effective way to communicate that something is possible
• Staff exchange across countries among LAGs has been insightful and LAGs should have a communication plan
• Tailored made information specifically defined target groups is important
• Positive media coverage is one of the key effective tools to speak to institutions and politicians
• The challenge remains to quantify results to be demonstrated to politicians
• Urban and rural CLLD, LEADER and CLLD become terms that create confusion. Are those different and how is this reflected in communication is not clear. How do we marry those terms? How to translate them?
• Acronyms are not communicative on the community level
• LEADER has been too much codified and may be  CLLD needs to have a more flexible framework
• Technocratic terms need to give way to why and what conditions are necessary- language needs to be developed to communicate CLLD in a simple way

Should be there different approaches utilized within different funds?