In order to develop the Policy Influence Toolkit, a series of five online capacity building sessions were organised by ALL DIGITAL for STEAMonEdu project partners. Each of the sessions focused on a different layer and scenario, with the purpose of supporting project partners to develop and consolidate their policy-making strategy and to ensure a transversal action across Member States involved in the action.

With these sessions, we tried to provide a clear insight on how the institutions operate and to define the role of each organisation in convincing their government and policy makers in the importance of our cause. The sessions were centred on concrete examples of advocacy strategies and described diverse tools tailored to different actors at various levels. They were all moderated by ALL DIGITAL’s CEO Renato Sabbadini and involved speakers from partner organisations and external experts.

We have already talked about the first three sessions in our blogs The Way to Advocacy and One step closer to successful advocacy.

The 4^th session on 3 December, was focused on effective advocacy practice to influence policy at national level. In the discussion with Pierluigi Vaglioni, Italian representative on the Working Group DELTA of DG EAC and public official at the Ministry of Education of the Italian Republic, participants learned about national policy-making environments and advocacy dynamics; some tools and approaches used at national level; and practical examples of national advocacy.

The 5^th, final, session on 10 December “Effective communication strategies” was devoted to the most important aspects of effective communication in policy-making – how to develop communication strategy for advocacy, how to create and communicate advocacy message(s), engage policy makers and key stakeholders, and organise awareness raising campaigns.

Valentin Dupouey, Head of Communications at European Green Party, gave a detailed presentation about Advocacy-Campaigns-Comms. Valentin talked about elements of successful campaigns and tips for advocacy with practical effective examples at European level.

Valentin’s engaging presentation was complemented by Ekaterina Clifford of ALL DIGITAL, who touched upon other aspects Communicating for advocacy with the focus on what ALL DIGITAL does in policy and advocacy, what STEAMonEdu consortium can do as a whole to influence policy, and what tools, channels, approaches each partner can use in their work to convince busy policy-makers and raise awareness among educators and general public about the importance and benefits of STE(A)M education.

STEAMonEdu consortium thanks all the speakers for sharing their expertise and hopes these sessions will support partners in their activities to ensure proper impact and further exploitation of project results.

By ALL DIGITAL