Authors
Massimo Cristaldi, Federico Sangiorgio
Abstract
Dissemination and marketing campaigns have the objective to stimulate the interest of main stakeholders (Emergency Services providers – ES) and other interested parties of the EmerGent “ecosystem” (e.g. citizens expected to contribute through the use of the dedicated mobile APP and the social media).
Keep ES providers informed about the project status fosters understanding both the benefits and the impacts of the adoption of the EmerGent solution and the needs in terms of adaptation needed of existing tools and operational procedures. For this reason, the dissemination stemming from the EmerGent project involves a liaison with identified end-users and other professionals involved in disaster management, also with the aim to get important feedback from them. Key dissemination milestones for the EmerGent dissemination plan, from the ES point of view, were stakeholder workshops where interested end-users were provided with the opportunity to discuss the EmerGent technical solution, to perform tests and to better understand how to adopt the provided tools. Details about the dissemination activities and results are part of deliverable D7.1, while the current deliverable is focused on the description of the instruments used in the project for dissemination activities and the marketing campaign.
For what concerns specific dissemination and marketing channels, the dedicated web platform 112.social described in the following of the document, has been developed and constantly updated to offer the possibility to access information on the adopted technologies and technical solutions readiness status, also through video and audio tutorials. Along with the above-mentioned web platform, project’s related information and disparate emergency related “news” and events are also disseminated through the use of dedicated Twitter and Facebook channels, both identified with the account @112.social .
The marketing campaign, un between February and April 2017, is targeted to Italian citizens. The specific geographic area covered by the campaign was the Sicily region of Italy, since the project wants to collect, as main outcome of the campaign itself, relevant statistics about the use of a mobile APP for supporting the activities of ES in real events, and the Civil Protection of Sicily (DRPC Sicilia in the following) has already adopted a mobile APP used for C2A (direct) communication. Therefore, the project requested and received approval by DRPC Sicilia to gather anonymous statistical data on the C2A alerts sent by citizens with the APP “Anch’ioSegnalo”, and on the use of these alerts by Control Room operators.
After looking at existing statistics about use and audience, of the most common social media networks – such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ – it was decided to focus the marketing campaign on Facebook and Instagram only, as they seem to be the most widely used channels both around the world and in Italy.
The campaign strategy itself is mainly focused on the use of highlighted posts on Facebook that use mainly the concept of MEMEs, cultural symbols and social ideas virally-transmitted as images with captions, text or photos through the Internet, and therefore able to spread very quickly across social media.
Purpose of the Document
In accordance with the Description of Work (DoW), the objective of the “D7.2 – Dissemination campaign” is to provide information about the initiatives the consortium has put in place in order to keep both the supply side (Emergency Services – ES) and the demand side (citizens) informed about the technical details and benefits linked to the adoption of the EmerGent tools.
This means promoting the integration of the EmerGent prototype with existing Emergency Services (ES) tools, and especially encouraging citizens regarding the possibility to contribute to emergency management activities using the dedicated EmerGent mobile APP.
The document also reports on the main outcomes of the marketing campaign based on social media, in order to understand:
- to what extent the marketing campaign has been useful in improving citizens’ knowledge and awareness of the project targets
- to what extent it has been useful for “recruiting” new people wishing to use the mobile APP for sending information to the ES
- what are the perceived benefits of using the mobile APP to provide the said information in real-life situations
In fact, the technological solutions proposed in EmerGent implicitly enable novel concepts of Citizens as a Sensor (CaaS) and Crowd Sourcing, which are expected to help improving and “calibrating” the information that emergency authorities are normally able to retrieve through other channels. While the marketing campaign was running, starting from the assumption that a certain number of people downloads the mobile APP for sending real observations to a specific ES in the geographical area of Sicily (Italy) – the target area of the campaign itself – statistics were collected with the ultimate objective to evaluate the reliability and usefulness of this new source of information in handling real-life events.
