About the Project

NPA regions face the same challenges: an ageing population, rural isolation, travel distances and physical barriers, a lack of cultural facilities, a lack of job opportunities and a shortage of things to do, particularly for young people, who do not return after education and may have little interest in the unique heritage of their region.

Economically, CADI SHAC partner regions face the same issues: remoteness from markets, distance from major population centres and limited local customer base, weak market access for producers, limited economic diversification, lack of critical mass & higher delivery and production costs.

These conditions are exacerbated by a lack of labour market capacity, particularly in digital technology. SMEs and micro-businesses typically don’t have the skills, time or bandwidth to harness emerging digital technology and exploit the potential of digital marketing and analytics. The lack of capacity in digital skills also inhibits communities from celebrating and exploiting their own natural and cultural assets (landscape, folklore, language, etc.), constraining the potential for environmental and cultural tourism.

These shared challenges have been amplified by COVID. Restrictions on travel and tourism have reinforced the need for SMEs to innovate to exploit online markets, enhancing their online presence and distinctiveness, and engaging potential customers in an increasing congested space. To prosper under COVID, SMEs also need to use analytics to better understand their online market. Community end users of CINE and STRATUS and creative SMEs must also mitigate COVID by increasing opportunities for virtual visits and remote participation.

CADI SHAC will support SME end users through upskilling and increasing their ability harness the latest immersive tech (allied to place-based approaches that celebrate local and cultural heritage) to create a more engaging effective online presence and maximise digital marketing and analytics.

The CADI SHAC project will combine the complementary knowledge, experience and outputs of 4 projects to engage with SMEs and encourage them to embrace the latest digital innovation to create a stand-out and more effective online presence and further capitalise on digital marketing and analytics, with the potential to engage with new/contemporary audiences.

The project will enhance the capacity of SMEs to harness digital stories and immersive tech (augmented and virtual reality) to further embed their organisations within local cultural and natural heritage and increase their market reach.

The project will also benefit end users such as museums and visitor centres, enabling them to enhance their online presence and to engage with remote visitors and participants.

Complementarity: three themes provide the focus for the project cluster. Each participating project aligns with two of the themes: Immersive tech (CINE, STRATUS and Digi2Market); Digital marketing/ analytics for SMEs (StoryTagging and Digi2market) & Placed-based approaches that celebrate and harness local and cultural heritage (StoryTagging, CINE and STRATUS).

Knowledge exchange and dissemination activities will allow end users and networks to add further value to their NPA experience through the knowledge, technology and outputs of the third complementary theme. For example: StoryTagging’s creative SMEs will learn how immersive technologies can be used to further enhance the experience of the text and audio stories that they are bringing to life through new products or works; Digi2market SMEs will learn how to harness place-based approaches to promote themselves and further enhance their profile and online presence; and CINE and STRATUS end users will learn how digital marketing can enhance the online profile and market presence of visitor and tourist attractions, and how data analytics can help them better understand their online audiences.

CADI SHAC will capture and share all the digital skills, training materials and toolkits developed by participating partners and will combine these resources in a one page info sheet disseminated to participating SMEs and end users, and promoted to other SMEs across the NPA region. The results of the dissemination workshops and short dissemination activities will be streamed, recorded, and pushed to partner networks, and captured in a streamed final conference and final report for dissemination across the NPA region.

CADI SHAC partners will collaborate to run four outreach and engagement events for all local SMEs in partner regions, to enhance their capacity to embrace digital tech to maximise their profile & effectiveness in a congested online space. In doing so CADI SHAC will maximize the transnational impact of existing outputs to increase the number of local SMEs exposed to the potential of digital innovation in in four regions.