The six awarded projects under the 2019 call “Boosting sustainable tourism development and capacity of tourism SMEs through transnational cooperation and knowledge transfer” launched by the EU’s COSME programme met online in order to enhance cooperation among themselves.
Initiated and organised by the European Innovation Council and SME Executive Agency (EISMEA), the six awarded projects – CEnTOUR, EU ECO-TANDEM programme, SUSTOUR, ETGG2030 – European Tourism Going Green 2030, Tourban and TOURISME came together for a training session on communication activities and synergy opportunities. While the primary objective of this online event held on 18 May was indeed enhancing the awarded projects’ and their communication teams’ capacities and skills for successful dissemination activities it had a great added value as these projects’ coordinators could discuss potential cooperation and synergies.
Attended by Consulta Europa Projects and Innovations as the TOURISME project’s coordinator and ACR+ as the project’s lead partner in charge of communication and dissemination, the event allowed them to reflect and cross-check their understandings on the EU programmes’ visibility requirements and visual identity as well as complete their knowledge of communication tools and channels and accompanying visual making tools. The event also helped the participants to understand and discover what EISMEA can do for the projects in terms of boosting their outreach.
The outcomes of this meeting and the discussion that took place reflected the need for synergies between projects. The main conclusions were that cooperation is necessary in order to maximise the outreach in terms of audience and increase the capitalisation and deployment of various outputs coming from each of the projects. While social media and websites will be the main tool for building synergies in the beginning, as soon as the sanitary conditions across Europe allow physical meetings and participation in each other’s events would be explored, too. As the projects would be advancing the coordinators also expressed the possibility of teaming up for certain common activities and tasks.
