RAISE Dissemination

RAISE DVD
A DVD containing footage from the three preparatory meetings and the presentation of the Citizens' Declaration to the European Commission and European Parliament is available on request at a cost of € 5 per copy. For receiving a copy, please send an email to Danilo Zaini (dzaini@isis-it.com).

Clear questions and answers on urban sustainability issues are the first factor of success for the citizens conference process.

But to achieve a wider impact of the project a clear exploitation strategy was needed from the outset, to avoid the risk that the “RAISE Citizens Conference” will remain an elitist experience of a “club” of 26 citizens + experts.

Thus, a second key factor of success was to have from the beginning an active dissemination through:

This RAISE project web-site: www.raise-eu.org
Links of RAISE to www.europa.eu.int and other relevant web-sites
Competition for the design of the RAISE Logo in the partners’ countries (amongst students in art schools) : Austria, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Romania
Brochure of the RAISE project
Early contacts with local or sectoral media (e.g. NGOs newspapers, free newspapers such as METRO, etc.) to announce the Conference and the selection of 26 candidates. Another possible source for chasing candidates at the EU level is the list of people using the EU web-site: http://europa.eu.int/yourvoice

Following these earlier dissemination steps, the RAISE video and press releases were used to disseminate the event through the national media (TV, newspapers) at the time of the Final Conference in Brussels.

Afterwards, the exploitation strategy was based on the concept of promoting the replication of the Citizens Conference in the EU member states. The aim of RAISE was to trigger this exploitation process by:

having some key interviews with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to gather their support to possible national initiatives;
based on the experience of the RAISE conference, produce a “protocol” for setting-up citizens conferences on sustainable urban living at national/local level

Besides these concrete steps, it is also important to raise in the panel of citizens and in the other people involved in the Citizens Conference process (e.g. project coordinators, stakeholders etc.) a “mission” feeling.