How to increase awareness of the benefits of cohesion policy across Italy, reaching a maximum number of people through various media? This was the challenge met by the “A Brave New Europe“ project, managed by Slow News. The project aimed at raising awareness through an awareness-raising campaign, running from October 2022 to September 2023.
- 05 December 2023
The project was designed to promote Cohesion Policy through 30 stories about the main themes of the EU Cohesion Policy, designed to reach different targets through the Slow News website and newsletter, student publication Zai.net, and the magazine and website of Internazionale. Mandragola Editrice worked on 8 journalistic investigations published in the monthly magazine Zai.net, the first in Italy written by high school students and distributed free of charge in all Italian high schools to around 40,000 readers. The journalists of the cooperative also trained young reporters from over 100 schools throughout Italy in media literacy and guided them in writing their articles. In the 2022-2023 school year, around 800 young reporters were trained in 8 Italian regions. A special cohesion policy edition of La Revue Dessiné Italia was produced, as was the web series “La Smonta”, a comedy-satirical journey that highlights some of the biggest preconceptions regarding the European Union.
The knock-on effect was of increased awareness and recognition of the impact and importance of Cohesion Funding on the quality of everyday life in Italy, especially for young people and journalists. The communication actions implemented as part of “A Brave New Europe” were very popular. The figures speak for themselves:
· 1,235,843 Impressions on social media;
· 3,801,022 Impressions through marketing campaigns;
· 259,000 visits to the website;
· 29,866 Impressions during the 11 live events;
· 1,900,000 impressions on page 6, Internazionale hard copy
· 26,519 impressions on YouTube for La Smonta
· 84,473 views on Facebook for La Smonta
Background
DG REGIO has concluded several partnerships (including with media) to showcase EU cohesion policy on the ground, with annual calls for proposals published respectively in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. A large number of projects have thus been implemented in 24 Member States.