Objectives

Place branding is a key element for the future of medium and small municipalities.

The main challenges for these towns is not only promoting themselves as a place to visit (tourism and events) but also as a place to work, study, invest, a place linked to talent, knowledge, creativity, innovation and economic activity. Designing and developing the right brand vision and strategy can play a fundamental role in fostering local development which in turn might lead to the creation of new work places and opportunities for the local population to thrive.

The participating municipalities have in common a situation where not many people decide to move in or businesses decide to invest.

This is due to a general lack of attraction of the cities. We are not communicating about us effectively due to a lack of knowledge on communication and skills.

Starting from these considerations the participating municipalities have identified the following needs:

1. need to create effective place branding strategies in order to increase the attractiveness of cities
2. lack of marketing skills among staff of municipalities
3. need to re-skill the staff by providing more training opportunities,
4. need to increase networking capacity of civil servants in order to involve local stakeholders and present the cities as a system.

This project will be carried out at a transnational level in order to allow a comparison among training methodologies and place branding strategies implemented in each country.

The transnational dimension of the project is expected to valorize the practices in a logic of complementarity, the result will be a set of practices whose impact is greater than the sum of the parts.

These practices will serve to create a training methodology and a peer learning process which will be developed and tested at transnational level on the staff of the municipalities.

OBJECTIVES

The general objective of the project therefore is to raise the attractiveness of European cities through the exchange of best practices on place branding strategies designed and implemented by Municipalities in order to create more favorable conditions for local development.

1. Developing high quality place branding skills in the staff of municipalities and, through indirect involvement, local stakeholders
2. Increasing the effectiveness of networking and place branding strategies of municipalities
3. Creating more on-the-job training provision for civil servants at local and transnational level

TARGET GROUPS

The target groups of the project are civil servants working in the partner municipalities, political representatives, and target groups indirectly involved in activities at local level such as business actors, including category associations, chamber of commerce, associations for the promotion of the territory.

EXPECTED RESULTS

The expected results of the project are:

1. Developing high quality place branding skills in the staff of municipalities and, through indirect involvement, local stakeholders.
2. Increasing the effectiveness of networking and place branding strategies of municipalities.
3. Fostering on-the-job training provision for civil servants at transnational level
4. Developing a Local Place Branding in collaboration with stakeholders to put in practice what they have learned and the competences acquired