Challenges of Disseminating Information to Broad Stakeholder Groups

This presentation will discuss the challenges involved in developing and implementing a complex dissemination strategy for a broad range of stakeholders using the case of the Bridging Research in Ageing and ICT Development (BRAID) project as an example. BRAID issues are embedded in broader societal issues including policy, e- inclusion efforts, employment, community care, health care, standards, insurance and business models. The intention of the dissemination plan is to identify and plan the methods by which information regarding the BRAID project can be communicated between the project team and to the various stakeholder groups. On the most basic level, we aim to ensure the project results are disseminated to all the groups identified in the early stages of the project. However, there is an increasing demand for “scaleable” stakeholder involvement in the development of the understandings in any baseline, multi-stakeholder mechanism identification, vision building, scenarios, trends and roadmaps. Dissemination strategies range from “passive” to “active”. Passive strategies do not require the stakeholder to actively engage, they can remain a passive recipient of BRAID information. Whereas active strategies require them to commit their own time to actively engage with BRAID information products, BRAID partners or other stakeholders. Likewise, stakeholder involvement in dissemination and impact creation ranges from “low” to “high”. A low level of involvement may simply take the form of receiving and reading our final roadmap. High-level involvement may take the form of regular community activity or attendance at stakeholder workshops. By structuring our dissemination around a range of stakeholder involvement methods, we aim to make it scaleable. In this instance scaleable means hundreds of users can remain passive recipients of information but can at any time easily move to higher forms of involvement via the community portal and hence become engaged in more active dissemination strategies such as meetings.