The final video of the NEWSERA project is out! In the video, we interviewed members of the NEWSERA Consortium to understand the most important results and interesting new trends that emerged during the course of the project, especially during the activity with the NEWSERA Community of Practice in the CitSciComm Labs. The video was shot during the NEWSERA Final conference and produced by videomaker Lino Greco and formicablu.
Watch the video until the end to get to know some representatives from the Pilot citizen science projects who participated in the Labs, and co-designed new communication strategies to increase their projects’ impact.
Co-creating success
During the final conference, we also took the time with some of the NEWSERA Pilots – the citizen science projects involved in the CitSciComm Labs. We asked them how NEWSERA helped them to improve their projects’ communication strategy, and if the collaboration brought some unexpected results.
“In our project we engage the public with the mapping of invasive plants, and for this project we chose a specific plant, Fallopia japonica” explained Elizabete Merchante (Invasoras.pt). “Our target audiences were policy makers and the public entities. We were already working with this group – the municipalities and conservation entities – but when we started collaborating with NEWSERA we were able to develop activities to reach the target more easily, such as webinars and training sessions for these audiences. These webinars were successful, but we also had an extra result: we proposed an action plan to manage these species at the national level.”
“Our citizen science project is called UrbamarBio, which focuses on monitoring the urban coast in Barcelona”, told us Sonia Linan (UrbamarBio). The project brings together different entities, like academia (the Institute of Marine Science) and enterprises (Anellides), which can be tricky by itself. “NEWSERA has helped us a lot to focus and work together on the same goals. We were able to develop new communication channels, such as a Telegram channel and a newsletter, that helped us a lot to get more citizens involved in the project. We were focused on schools and families, but NEWSERA helped us to expland our audience, reaching diving centers and academia. During the Labs, communication experts also suggested to focus more on the media: we thought that the press would not be interested in our project, but we were wrong. We were able to produce press releases and we had a very good impact, which helped us reach the Barcelona City Council. Thanks to this, now the Barcelona City Council has implemented the Biodiversity Atlas, with fish species that are coming from the UrbamarBio project!”
“The aim of our project is to collect data on protected species of insects in Italy: we ask people to go on the field and take pictures of protected species on insects”, explained Alessandro Campanaro (InNat). “We met NEWSERA in a moment in which we wanted to engage a different target of volunteers in the project, mainly young people. NEWSERA helped us develop new channels to engage young people, such as an Instagram profile and a Telegram channel, which was very important for the project. In the NEWSERA Labs we analyzed our strategy and saw the main gaps to fill. So we developed new tools and instruments, and discussed in which direction we had to go to have a more wide engagement of stakeholders in the project.”
Read more about the results of the NEWSERA Labs
