What kind of Public Relations is needed for the SAFECON project?

I was motivated to write this post (speaking the language of blogosphere) by the feeling of some dissatisfaction with the results of participating in the events of the St. Petersburg International Labor Forum in February 28.  At the Forum Kirsi Taivalantti, project leader, the Dean of the Faculty of Technology, Saimaa University of Applied Sciences and I presented the project in the form of a panel co-report.  There were few people, no one asked questions. It looked like we “shot out”, as they say, and that’s all. What’s next? It is clear that we are going to prepare for the next forum, for the next conferences. There have been quite many of them so far. If we recollect how we started our work at the project, from 2015 the very beginning of discussing the idea and preparing the application  to submit for the CBC Managing Authority we did our best to get comprehensive support for the project idea from the committees of the St. Petersburg government, from the National Association of Builders of Russia, the educational community.

Since 2015, at least 3 large conferences were held at the St. Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, in 2017 the idea of the project and plans for its implementation were presented at the 5-th All-Russian Week of Labor Protection in the city of Sochi and at the St. Petersburg International Labor Forum, several articles were published. I don’t say about meetings and seminars of the project participants. There were many of them, but this is our internal work, and they do not give anything for PR.

We published some materials about the project, but they were not interesting and not noticeable to society. Since November 2018, I gave interviews to the newspapers Delovoy Peterburg, St. Petersburg Gazette, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Materials about the project are also in electronic media on Instagram, on the SPbGASU website. Well, the process seems to have been started, and we are doing everything right and can just sit and wait for feedback from interested managers of construction companies. But there are not any. This means that in our PR activity something goes wrong, something is missing.

The group of speakers formed so far with their speeches at various kinds of public events is clearly not enough here. Probably another reason is that after conferences and forums are held we don’t keep in touch with their participants properly. I mean the mechanism for building relationships with project beneficiaries is not established yet. Obviously there are some other reasons.

Currently Why? and What to do? Questions remain open and in my opinion they  need to be solved as soon as possible.

Let’s discuss it.

I invite all readers of the post to discuss the problem.