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Interreg Europe communication during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way the Interreg Europe programme communicates. Physical events and face-to-face networking were no longer possible. The shift to the online world led to many adaptations for both our programme and our projects.

Below is a timeline with some of Interreg Europe's adaptations to this exceptional context.

March 2020: We started working from home and advised our projects how to move their meetings online.

May 2020: The first final conference (Cult-RInG project) took place online.

June 2020: The special online edition of the'Europe, let's cooperate'event focused on the role ofinterregional cooperation in the COVID-19 recovery.

July 2020: The SCALE UP project proposed a methodology for online study visits.

November 2020: We engaged our community with 30 stories of cooperationand promoted project results despite COVID-19.

April 2021: We opened a new call for additional project activities that are linked to the COVID-19 recovery.

Four communication actions helped Interreg Europe to tackle the challenges emerging from the COVID-19 crisis.

Moving activities online: Interreg Europe projects depend highly on face-to-face meetings, so it was quite a challenge to move their activities online. Thanks to the programme's guidance and their own creativity, the projects adapted their exchange of experience methodologies for peer reviews, study visits and thematic meetings to online formats. Our Policy Learning Platform also moved thematic seminars, policy discussions, matchmaking meetings and peer reviews online.

Promoting COVID-19 solutions: The COVID-19 pandemic affected many policy areas that are covered by the work of Interreg Europe projects. We asked the projects to tag their good practices and policy solutions that were relevant to the COVID-19 recovery or submit new ones to our good practice database.

To share this information with all interested policymakers, we created a special COVID-19 page as a repository of the relevant good practices, news and events.

Offering flexibility: As a result of the pandemic, our projects'activities stalled for a while. To keep their implementation on track, the Interreg Europe Monitoring Committee approved measures for additional activities and flexibility. For example, our projects could purchase equipment for online meetings, produce videos for their online study visits or request pilot actions more quickly than before, especially if they were relevant to the COVID-19 crisis.

Connecting with the community: Interreg Europe's community of project partners and stakeholderscould notmeet face to face for over a year. We did our best to keep the partnerships alive on social media, for example through an active Facebook group for projects and by posting engaging visuals on Instagram. When hosting online events, we have been live-tweeting on Twitter to interact with our followers.

After a year of adaptation, we are happy to say that these four actions helped us keep the interregional cooperation going when it was needed more than ever.

A 'new normal' for communication?

The pandemic forced us to rethink our communication methods and draw lessons for the future.

Online activities had been a standard part of Interreg Europe's communication methods mix well before the pandemic. For a year now, we have been testing new tools andformats to make our online events even more accessible and engaging. High participation and satisfaction rates confirm that we are going in the right direction.

We were also happy to find out that many projects' online solutions turned out to be largely as effective as their traditional face-to-face meetings. So, online activities might find their place among future projects' exchange of experience methodologies.

However, people do miss the face-to-face side of cooperation.The 'new normal' for communication is likely to take a hybrid form, combining face-to-face meetings with online activities for remote participants.

Petra Polaskova is Coordinator of Communication and Contact Points at the Interreg Europe secretariat

This article appears in Rural areas: an eye to the future

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