Designing dissemination strategies to maximise stakeholder engagement

Policy-focused research projects must engage with an array of stakeholders to ensure that policy recommendations are relevant to a large proportion of the population and align with the needs of organisations and policy-makers responsible for their implementation. Strategies of stakeholder engagement and dissemination are key to any research programme, particularly in e-inclusion where stakeholders are fragmented. This article uses examples from the Bridging Research in Ageing and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Development (BRAID) project, funded under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission, to examine the effectiveness of different stakeholder engagement strategies and make recommendations for future policy-focused research projects. The BRAID project findings indicate that certain engagement strategies are more successful that others at integrating particular stakeholders. Based on this, we recommend that projects evaluate the types of stakeholders they are successfully reaching, design their dissemination strategies accordingly, and use a variety of engagement activities to ensure that all stakeholders are represented. Citation: Finn RL, Cummings E, Nixon P, Wright D (2014) Designing dissemination strategies to maximise stakeholder engagement. Healthy Aging Research 3:12. doi:10.12715/har.2014.3.12 Received: October 26, 2014; Accepted: November 19, 2014; Published: December 9, 2014 Copyright: © 2014 Finn et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * Email: [email protected]