Part A (Slides 3–5): A self-assessment across six leadership dimensions. Read each dimension, reflect on the questionnaire prompts, rate yourself honestly. Your profile feeds into Activity 9.3 Section 1 (leadership context) and shapes which communication roles you take on.
Part B (Slides 6–7): The six-element impact narrative structure and three story formats. Read the guidance and examples. Draft your impact narrative directly in Activity 9.3 Section 5.
Before designing your communication strategy, identify who you need to communicate with. Read the four audience types below. Then decide which two or three are your priority right now — based on what decisions or commitments you need from them in the next 12 months.
Regional councillors, mayors, heads of agencies who control the budget lines your programme depends on.
Primary producers, bio-based enterprise owners, cooperative presidents — the people your programme is designed to support.
Banks, impact investors, private enterprises, cooperative federations who could co-finance infrastructure or provide patient capital.
Local and regional journalists, social media, community groups, general public — who shape the political legitimacy of your programme.
Read each dimension. Click the card to open the full description and questionnaire prompts. Rate yourself 1–5 across each. Your profile feeds into Activity 9.3 Section 1.
Systems analysis, long-horizon orientation, multi-level navigation in complex governance environments.
Quadruple helix engagement, coalition building, network management across institutional boundaries.
Audience adaptation, storytelling, visual communication — making complex systems legible to non-specialists.
Learning orientation, uncertainty tolerance, willingness to experiment with explicit learning loops.
Willingness to challenge, use of discretionary powers, genuine accountability acceptance.
Sustained commitment, recovery from setbacks, managing long-horizon work in short-cycle political environments.
The profile is constructive, not evaluative. High scores tell you where you have leverage. Low scores tell you where to develop. The most important output is the two development priorities you commit to in Activity 9.3.
High-scoring dimensions are your primary contribution to governance teams and coalitions. How you use them depends on your role:
Development priorities are not weaknesses to apologise for — they are where investment produces the most growth. For each low-scoring dimension, one concrete action within your current role:
The profile is most useful for two things:
Every effective bioeconomy governance leader performs three distinct functions. Most public officials are strongest in one and weakest in another. Knowing which you are determines how you build your team and how you design your communication strategy.
Understands the system — its actors, resource flows, power dynamics, and failure points — well enough to make a reliable diagnosis. Can distinguish a symptom from a root cause. Can identify which intervention at which leverage point would produce the most change.
Designs governance structures, policy instruments, and support systems that work for the specific conditions of the territory — not generic models imported without adaptation. Ensures internal consistency between governance model, financial model, and service portfolio.
Convenes diverse actors, builds shared understanding, and produces decisions and commitments that no single actor could reach alone. Creates conditions for collective action without imposing a predetermined outcome. Manages conflict productively.
Every effective bioeconomy governance communication — regardless of audience or format — can be built from these six elements. Read each card. The guiding question tells you what to write. The example shows what it looks like. The common mistake shows what to avoid.
"What three details would make someone who has never visited understand what your territory looks, sounds, or feels like?"
"What is being wasted, lost, or overlooked that your initiative addresses — in terms your audience already cares about?"
"What did your institution do, with whom, and over what timeframe — in plain language?"
"What is specifically and measurably different now? Use numbers from your KPI Framework."
"Who is one real individual whose specific situation changed — and what changed for them?"
"What precisely are you asking this specific audience to do — by when?"
The six elements assemble differently depending on what you are trying to achieve with each audience. Read the three formats and decide which one fits each communication situation in your Activity 9.3 strategy.
Opens with what is being lost or wasted. Builds urgency. Ends with "if we do not act, this is what continues." Used when your audience needs to understand the cost of inaction before they will consider investing in change.
Opens with what is now possible. Centres the change that has happened or is happening. Builds confidence and aspiration. Used when your audience understands the problem and needs to believe a solution is viable.
Opens with the moment of decision. Puts the audience at the centre as the agent of change. The change and the person are evidence that the action being requested works. Ends with a precise, bounded, achievable invitation.
Effective communication about bioeconomy governance investment requires matching the right evidence to the right audience. Your message is only as strong as the evidence that supports it.
The European bioeconomy governance evidence base — developed through Horizon Europe Cluster 6 research, Interreg pilot programmes, and the EU Bioeconomy Monitoring System — has produced a consolidated set of validated policy messages covering governance models, financing mechanisms, public awareness, and stakeholder engagement.
These messages were tested across multiple pilot regions in comparable rural contexts. Rather than developing your key messages from scratch, your communication strategy in Activity 9.3 draws on this validated evidence base — adapting the messages to your territorial context, your specific audiences, and your institutional voice.
When making the case for a specific policy decision — a shared processing facility investment, a governance platform commitment, a new enterprise support scheme — the strength of your argument depends on citing comparable precedents, quantified results, and validated models from contexts your audience recognises as credible.
For each key message in Activity 9.3 Section 2: name the specific evidence source — Interreg project evaluation, Horizon pilot result, CBE JU demonstration outcome, or national programme evaluation. A communication strategy without a mapped evidence base is a set of claims without proof.
For local political audiences, comparative EU evidence is useful context — but your own territorial data is the most persuasive evidence of all. Your KPI Framework from Activity 5.3, the enterprise employment figures, the investment mobilised, the enterprises supported — these are the numbers that make the case to a regional councillor or a cooperative president who knows your territory.
Element 4 of the impact narrative (The change) is where your KPI data becomes communication material. Populate it before you complete Activity 9.3 Section 5.
Political communication has windows — budget cycles, electoral calendars, programme review milestones. A well-evidenced argument presented at the wrong moment in the political cycle will fail. A weaker argument presented at the right moment may succeed.
Activity 9.3 Section 4 (engagement calendar) asks you to map your communication actions to political and programme timing windows. Build your calendar around the decisions you need to influence, working backwards from decision dates to when your communication must reach its audience.