Most of the awareness campaign and of the pre-events were thus concentrated in the period from August 25 to September 24.
As in previous Society projects, a considerable part of the work of WP1 was dedicated to the organization and promotion of a rich program of: 1) pre-events for the general public, in the framework of “Aspettando la Notte Europea dei Ricercatori” (Waiting for the ERN) series) 2) lessons for the schools of all levels in the framework of "Per le Scuole 2021" program.
In 2021 30 pre-events (24 onsite or in mixed mode and 6 fully online) were organized in the month preceding the ERN. The relatively good situation in Italy as concerns the Covid-19 pandemics allowed us to organize the majority of pre-events onsite, although the participants were limited in number by health safety rules. Most pre-events and the main ERN event were included in the summer event program promoted by the Municipality of Bologna "Bologna Estate". This gave good visibility to the project and contributed positively to the awareness campaign.
Researchers from the Society consortium made themselves available to give face-to-face or online lectures in the schools. The rich program of available lessons (a total of 74 for all school levels) was advertised directly to teachers and also through the channels of the Regional School Office of the Ministry of Education. Schools in Italy start mid-September and this leaves too little time to plan lessons before ERN. Furthermore, this year, schools had to face quite challenging problems for returning students to attendance after last year's remote teaching period. For these reasons most lessons have been scheduled to take place in the period after ERN, preferably by the end of October, but even beyond.
SOCIETY Rinascimento organized activities and events for the European Researchers’ Night in 2021 in seven towns in the Emilia Romagna Region, Italy: Bologna, Ravenna, Forlì, Cesena, Rimini, Predappio and, for the first time, Ferrara. Given the difficulty to predict the evolution of the pandemic and of the corresponding restrictions, the consortium decided from the very beginning to opt for a dual approach, organizing activities and events both online and in the streets.
The SOCIETY Rinascimento project organised a mixed online/onsite event, featuring 37.5% of activities in presence and 62.5% online. A total number of 384 researchers were involved, 10 of whom benefited from MSCA funds, while 91 researchers were supported by other EU schemes.
We estimated that approximately 4700 people attended all events. Considering the pandemic limitations, we registered a good onsite attendance in Bologna (approximately 2000 participants), Rimini (354), Ferrara (330), Ravenna (231), Forlì (144). Online activities were followed through the sharevent platform (723 registered users) or through social media channels such as youtube and Fb (965). The web page where the scientific magazine Sapere was made available for download had more than 800 accesses, both during the Night (183) and afterwards.
