Building a Community Through Communications: Our Work with NDPC in Communications & Audience Development
Where We Started
Diagonal has been supporting the Northern Dimension Partnership on Culture (NDPC) with communications and audience development across two major European initiatives working at the intersection of culture, health and wellbeing: the CultureAndHealth Platform and AWAKE: Arts & Wellbeing as a Creative Business and Future Livelihood.
Co-funded by the European Union and coordinated by Culture Action Europe, the CultureAndHealth Platform brings together organisations and practitioners from across Europe to strengthen collaboration between the cultural, healthcare, education and social sectors, while supporting more than 200 emerging artists working across these fields.
With such a broad network of partners, practitioners and audiences, our role has been to help turn a this initiative into something people could connect with: making its communications more accessible, human and community-led, while building greater recognition around the growing culture and health field.
The Problem We Solved
Communicating a large-scale European project means speaking to very different audiences at once, all with different needs and reasons to engage with the initiative: artists and cultural practitioners need opportunities, resources and a sense of connection; health and social care professionals need to understand how cultural practice intersects with their own fields; partners need visibility for activity happening across different countries; while policymakers and sector leaders need access to knowledge, evidence and wider conversations shaping the field.
Our approach focused on moving the CultureAndHealth Platform beyond an institutional project identity and towards a stronger sense of community.
Across social media, newsletters and web content, we developed audience-centred communications that translated specialist themes into accessible stories, opportunities and conversations.
Rather than simply communicating what the project was doing, we focused on why it mattered, who was behind the work and how audiences could take part, creating more space for artists’ voices, partner activity and knowledge from across the network.
Creating Momentum for the Culture & Health Forum
A major focus of the work in 2026 was the communications campaign for the Culture & Health Forum in Vienna, bringing together artists, health and social sector professionals, international experts, policymakers and organisations from across Europe.
Our campaign gradually built momentum around the Forum through programme announcements, speaker storytelling, artist features and targeted registration messaging.
The response was very positive, with every available conference place being filled in less than 10 days.
Supporting Sustainable Creative Careers Through AWAKE
Our work with NDPC has also included communications for AWAKE: Arts & Wellbeing as a Creative Business and Future Livelihood, an EU co-funded initiative exploring how artists and creative professionals can develop more sustainable careers at the intersection of arts and wellbeing.
The project approached culture and wellbeing through the lens of professionalisation and creative entrepreneurship, giving practitioners practical resources to think about sustainable business models, partnerships and future livelihoods.
Its activities included a series of online masterclasses, a casebook exploring entrepreneurial models across Europe, and an international hackathon bringing together more than 50 creatives to develop new ideas connecting culture and wellbeing.
Diagonal joined the project during its final phase in 2025, supporting communications around its concluding hybrid event in Helsinki, Finland, and helping amplify the resources, conversations and knowledge developed throughout the project.
The goal was to communicate the end of an EU-funded project not as an ending, but as an opportunity for its knowledge and resources to continue travelling, reaching artists, creative entrepreneurs, cultural workers and wellbeing professionals.
The Outcomes
Across both projects, the approach combines communications strategy with hands-on content creation and audience development, using digital communications not simply to broadcast activity, but to encourage people to discover, participate, share and connect.
Over a recent 90-day period, content for the CultureAndHealth Platform generated more than 95,000 Instagram views, alongside meaningful engagement through saves, shares, comments and direct registrations.
The Culture & Health Forum reaching capacity in less than 10 days provided another tangible indication of that engagement translating into reaching the event target.
But the wider shift has been about recognition and community: developing a warmer and more consistent digital presence, giving the people behind the work greater visibility, and making complex cross-sector knowledge easier to discover by a wide range of audiences playing different roles in the culture and wellbeing landscape.
For us, it’s a reminder that communications around European cultural projects don’t have to feel institutional – when strategy begins with the audience – understanding what they need, what will make them care and how they can participate – communications can become part of the infrastructure that holds a community together.
