In this week's episode of The Grant, I’m joined by Borut Razbornik for a practical and very useful conversation about dissemination in EU projects and why the standard approach so often fails. We begin with the familiar problem: projects produce many outputs, upload them to a website, post about them on social media, count impressions and hope that this somehow leads to impact. Borut challenges that logic. For him, dissemination should not only be about visibility, but about whether people actually use, adopt, test or engage with the results of a project.

The conversation then moves into Borut’s marketing-inspired approach to dissemination. Drawing on his background in marketing management and international sales and marketing, he explains why attention is scarce, why generic project messages rarely work, and why projects need to think much more carefully about target groups, timing, relevance and usefulness. We also discuss his “flagship strategy”: choosing the most useful and shareable project result, building the dissemination effort around it, and connecting the rest of the project outputs to that central asset. It is an episode for anyone who works with EU project communication, dissemination, exploitation or impact — especially those who feel that the usual quantity-driven approach is no longer enough.

Time codes:

01:47 Guest introduction and fly in

06:09 The Problem: Dissemination That Doesn’t Work

16:06 Understanding Attention – A Marketing Perspective

26:05 A Different Approach – The Flagship Strategy

41:42 Embedding Dissemination in the Work Itself

48:12 Working Within Constraints

57:06 Reflections and Advice

58:47 The toughest challenge