III.  Public relation measures and media co-operation

In order to support the single project activities aimed at reaching a broad public the following public relation measures were set up:

*        A free card with the address of the common project website: www.citizens.eu.org

*        Posters were produced to announce the public competition, the workshops and the final conference in Vienna. The posters for the public competition and the workshops were made in all languages of the partner countries. The posters for the Final Conference were only published in English as the partner countries nominated their national delegations to the Conference (enclosed in the annex).

*        A leaflet with the aim of the project (in all partner languages) and the Central European Declaration (in English) was published in order to guarantee sustainability (enclosed in the annex).

*        A project homepage was created which accompanied the single project activities. 

The free cards were produced in Austria and delivered to all partner countries.

The posters of the public competition and the workshops were elaborated in Austria and sent to the partners electronically. So they had the possibility to adapt the posters for their special needs as the contents were different in all partner countries (language, dates and subjects of the single activities).  

The posters for the Final Conference in Vienna as well as the leaflets were produced directly in Austria in co-operation and accordance with the partners and then distributed to the partner countries.  

Under http://www.citizens.eu.org a project homepage was created. The homepage will be online until the end of the year 2003 and describes the activities of the project on the start site. It also presents the project partners (“Partners”) with their own websites and includes links (“Links”) to the European Institutions and the Constitutional Convention sites. Under the button “About” the aim and the single actions of project are described according to the project application to the Commission.  

The main language of the homepage is English except the announcement of project activities carried out in the partner countries such as the public competition which have been published in the languages of the partner countries in order to reach the citizens on the spot. The homepage has been updated permanently by the Info point Europe Vienna (project co-ordinator) so that the users were able to see the progress of the single project phases. Of course the websites only contains those information and documents which has been provided by all partners – therefore for example not all workshops are mentioned on it. 

Concerning co-operation with the media each partner was requested to find media partners in order to promote the project activities in their countries. The media co-operation included the announcement of for coming activities on the one hand, and reports of realised actions on the other hand.  

The single project countries were more or less successful in reaching a media coverage for their activities. The main reason was, that most of the newspapers, radio and television station did not want to report for free and that the costs for announcements were not covered by the project budget.  

Media coverage was reached in Austria, Italy, Slovenia and Romania. In these countries a long lasting media co-operation between the project partners and the single media already existed.  Personal known journalists are more willing to report special activities which do not really fit in their daily press work.  

Concerning the contents of the single media reports it was interesting that the media reflected more on the activities targeted to young people than on political debates with opinion leaders for adults. 

In addition to country wide, regional and local media coverage the partners of the project who edit own publications promoted the project activities in their journals or newsletters.