In a previous post, we wrote about the importance of the project website and how to ensure it becomes the central hub for your project communications.
This, of course, is hugely important during the project’s lifespan – a time when all the work takes place, and your main aim is to keep your targeted audience informed about progress and prepare them to engage further once the results are in.
But you shouldn’t stop there and forget all about your project website once the funding ends and the partners move on. You have spent three or four years working hard to deliver your results and develop outcomes that will make a real difference for all your stakeholders and end users.
Now is the time to shout loudest about this work and these results – and it’s worth ensuring your project website helps you do just that.
Pivot your website
So, one of the most important communication and dissemination tasks you can perform at the end of your project is to make sure you pivot your project website – transforming it from one that informs the world about what you are doing to one that explains what you have done and how people can benefit from these outcomes.
Make sure your site now prioritises outcomes, offering your audience a fresh perspective on the project and its results. Retain information about your original objectives and motivations, but present a renewed vision of the project. Highlight how you delivered, the results you achieved, and, crucially, the benefits these outcomes offer, along with how your target users can also benefit from these advantages.
Support this re-focus by updating your project communication database with a repository of more detailed information, so stakeholders have access to relevant published papers, have sight of publicly available diagrams, charts and other useful material and can discover precisely how your results can fit into their organisation.
Finally, make sure you clearly showcase who these users need to contact to find out more. This may be a different person for different results or may be one central contact. These decisions would have been made in your exploitation planning, but make sure each of these contacts is fully prepared to engage should that call come in.
HyperCOG website relaunch
As dissemination, communication and exploitation leaders for the recently finished HyperCOG project, Insight Media has just re-launched the project website, completely re-working its content and structure to focus on the promising results the project delivered.
As well as this work, we have also launched a coordinated promotion of the results to the target audiences and to the media via press releases. This has led to valuable coverage and several enquiries.
While this outreach extends beyond the parameters of the project funding received by Insight Media, we believe it is essential to go the extra mile. Our aim is always to ensure that significant achievements, made possible by public funding, do not fade into obscurity once the project concludes.
- If you want to leverage Insight Media’s expertise to provide your project with an effective, beautiful and responsive website even when your project has come to an end, or simply have on board the experts in project dissemination, communication and exploitation in your next proposal, then get in touch with Sam Davis at sam@insightm.co.uk
- Visit the new, results-focused HyperCOG website