Working with Erasmus students ad city ambassadors

Being young and international, infact, they represent for us, as institutions, an area of audience extremely hard to reach, considering how young people can perceive “official” channels as boring, burocratical, unpersonal; and how crucial it is for the cities to get contents and opinions from abroad.
In Genoa we realized that one of the main challenges of our job is to widen as much as possible our audience on the social media outside the city community: we are trying to do it with, but not only, Interactive Cities.

On the other hand, Erasmus Students are people who chose your city and who can tell it talking directly with their peers, with a level of reliability that any touristic booklet or any refined marketing campaing will ever reach. Engaging them as Ambassadors of our city can really be a winning shot.

That’s why, a couple of years ago, we decided to pass from a quite institutional and “cold” presence at the Welcome Day that University of Genoa organises every year at the moment of their arrival, to a more involved and articulated action of city marketing.

In the last three years we offered to the students taking part of the Welcome Eramsus Day a guided tour of the old city, something like an orientative tour to give them a first idea of the city.

This year we tried to involve them more directly, opening three actions:

- a competition reserved to young foreigners student who followed the Italian lessons offered for free by University of Genoa (in these weeks we will start publishing the best tales on our tourist blog www.genovamorethanthisblog.it)

- an Instagram Challenge, using the hashtag #ErasmusGenova2016

- a Treasure Hunt, in cooperation with GEG – ESN, the genoese section of Erasmus Students Network, an association active all over Europe involving local students who, as volounteers, welcome and give supports to the Erasmus coming to their town; to be more precise, it was a Selfie Treasure Hunt, where the kids, in teams, were asked to shoot as many selfies as possible in a serie of more than 100 locations of art, culture an entertainement in the old town (you can see the pictures here).

The reward for the “winners” has been a physical, real experience (something “analogic”, after all those digital moments!): a Pesto Class, to let them learn how to prepare pesto in the traditional way, with the marble mortar. This choice allowded us to offer them (and to share on the social media) one very important thing, according with recent and consolidated tourism marketing trends: not a standard tourist product (as a ticket for a museum or a booklet) but an experience, something personal and memorable.

In the same weeks, we proposed it as a possible common action to be developed with our ULG; in some case the cooperation is already on (with Acquarius, Palazzo Ducale, Chamber of Commerce). The potentialities and the strenght of this action are clear, so we could note a huge interest by the partners. The action will become the object of a dedicated sub-group, starting from the new year, and we are sure that the URBACT methodology will help us in boosting the action, strenghtening the cooperation with the partner. Most of all, we will work more and better with our collegues of the School and Youth Policies Department of the Municipality , and with more Departments of the University. Indeed, this action as been the beginning of a work of integrated promotion of the city and the University, both the institutions being aware of the importance of each other reputation to improve their attractiveness.

Of course, things are never so easy, and there are still margins to improve the results: in the last year we involved more or less 40 Erasmus, representing about the 10% of the students present in town.

But the main strenght of this action is the chance to discover their point of view on the city and the voice they choose to tell it: we are interested in “exploiting” them as marketing tools, but also in understanding what they see when they look at Genoa, why they choose it, and how much their storytelling is similar to the one we are proposing, telling and living.

One of them wrote that Genoa is a city “for those who get bored by perfection”, it sounds extremely similar to our idea of a city “more than this”: maybe through their eyes we can imagine the city we hope to see!