D7.4 – Final dissemination and communication plan and report

This deliverable presents the Final Dissemination and Communication Plan and Report for the ARIADNEplus project. The report covers the final 12-month period (M37-M48, i.e., January 2022- December 2022) for the dissemination and communication activities undertaken by the lead team at PIN Scrl and the (40+) partners involved in the project. As the deliverable D2.5 Final Report on Networking and Integration covers much of the dissemination activity for M37-M48, this deliverable mainly focuses upon the communication activity for the same period. Note that the figures used actually go to early M48 due to the holidays falling at the end of the deadline, so the report has been prepared a month early, to allow for review and submission prior to the start of the holidays. The first Dissemination and Communication Plan identified the different stakeholders and described how these may be reached. During the first period, the project partners and their organisations were the main focus for dissemination and communication, with this policy continuing for the second period (M19-M36). Information and news continued to be published on the website, which is aimed at a wider audience, with other methods of communication which have included partner mailing lists, social media channels and the Project Newsletter. In the final period, the focus of the dissemination has been more on the Portal in order to build up a user base and to further build the community as part of the long-term sustainability of the network. This has been made easier with the easing of COVID-related travel restrictions which has enabled partners to participate in face-to-face events and for Transnational Access to resume. The website homepage was slightly redesigned to give direct access to the Catalogue search landing page within the Portal, along with another section going to the services. The target of 30,000 unique visitors was met by M48. After the homepage, the most popular page was the Portal (link from the menu bar) followed by Trans-National Access (TNA). Social media referrals, along with partner websites and the site for the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (e-rihs.eu) are important sources of visitors. Twitter has continued to grow and remains the key social media channel for ARIADNEplus. Both Slideshare and Zenodo have been effective channels, with the latter being significant as it is aimed at the project’s key audience. With the return to physical events, a new leaflet was produced as well as a new poster. Both were used at booths at European Association of Archaeology (EAA), Budapest (31st August-3rd September) and the Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT), Vienna (10th-12th November). The project newsletter subscriber base has grown, albeit slowly, but the open rate has remained consistently high at around 40%. The Partners have continued to participate in events with sessions being held at both EAA and CHNT. In addition, NARA presented at DH2022 in Tokyo, bringing the project to the attention of a new audience in Asia. They have also been active in terms of publications, achieving in excess of 15,000 downloads. In particular, the PARTHENOS Guidelines to “FAIRify data management and make data reusable” which has been translated into more languages by ARIADNEplus, including Czech (532 views and 315 downloads), Portuguese (573 views, 363 downloads ) and Turkish (664 views, 447 downloads) has had 4,249 downloads in total to date (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3937149). The new Portal (Catalogue and Services) has been in existence since January 2021, with updates happening along the way and more datasets being uploaded over this 24-month period. At the end of 2021 (M36), there had been around 7K visitors - by 9th December 2022, this had increased to 32K new users, an increase of 25K, (357%). The UK dominates in term of visitor source countries, due to ADS having a significant share of the datasets within the portal, as well as being the first organisation to upload their data. Looking at the top 10 sources, all except Australia (No. 10) have datasets in the Portal which tends to suggest that the combined dissemination at project level and by the partners themselves is helping to attract new users. Transnational Access resumed in 2022 as three Summer Schools and a Winter School which covered all the training on offer. A total of 37 places were offered, 34 either transferring from 2020 or applying for the first time in 2022. Of these 32 attended the Summer Schools, two candidates dropping out at short notice for personal reasons. Students came both from partners (and Associate Partners) within ARIADNEplus with a few external ones as well. Despite missing two years, the attendance targets were mostly close to being met. In addition, four training events were held during 2022, all having international audiences. All training received positive feedback from the participants. The Monitoring and Assessment indicator targets were all met and in, most cases, well exceeded apart from the Newsletter which was slightly under at 85%. ARIADNEplus now has over 2,000 Twitter followers (with an effective audience of thousands more), a well-established Community on Zenodo with a download figure in excess of 10,000 and a growing affiliate programme in the form of Associate Partners and close links with the COST Action SEADDA. Working hand in hand with WP2, WP7 has helped to build the ARIADNE Community to ensure the future sustainability of the Data Infrastructure, which has now been launched as the ARIADNE RI AISBL and will start operations in early 2023, once the registration has been finalised. The results of the dissemination activities and levels of engagement shown provide a solid foundation on which to continue and build on the project activities