Orange Polska - Icon Strategies Public Relations

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Orange in Poland, basing on solutions from its core telecommunications business, is helping more than 100 cities in Poland to transform into smart cities, making it a leader in this field. It offers smart solutions for managing public bikes, controlling city lighting, controlling air quality or reading water meters.

The company’s research shows that many small and medium-sized cities in Poland have the perception that smart city solutions are not affordable for them, while in fact the forms of financing smart solutions and the financial effects of their application could significantly reduce the budget expenditure of these cities.

Challenge

Orange Polska set the Icon Strategies team the task of raising awareness of the availability of smart solutions in 50 small and medium-sized Polish cities by effectively reaching out to officials who are responsible for city development and who could potentially be responsible for implementing smart city solutions in the future.

The challenge was both to build an appropriate communication programme and to identify in each office the people who could potentially be responsible for the smart development of their cities in the future. In the vast majority of small and medium-sized Polish cities, there are no dedicated positions, and development-related functions are often dispersed.

Strategy

Instead of searching in each city for people who could be responsible for the smart development of their cities in the future, we decided to identify the natural competence leaders in each city.

We then offered them a first-of-its-kind smart city competence development programme.

Implementation

We started the project by developing the facts, awareness and needs for smart solutions. The survey also identified the level of competence in cities with regard to smart solutions. Because it was complex, it required cities to identify people who were able to answer particular questions. In this way, we identified natural competence leaders in key areas of urban development with regard to the future application of smart city technologies.

In addition to the primary objective, the results of the survey were later used for communication activities with the media to position Orange Polska as a competence leader in this area.

The potential ‘smart city officers’ identified through the survey were then invited to the Smart City Leader Academy, the first such extensive educational programme. The programme was intended to enhance the officers’ competences, but at the same time to have the power to develop their specialist careers. That is why we invited the Association of Polish Cities, the most respected among officials, the oldest local government organisation in Poland, to partner in the programme.

The lecturers – practitioners, the best Polish specialists in the field of smart city, shared their unique knowledge and experience with the participants. In an engaging way, they showed how to choose the best solutions for a particular locality, how to implement them and where to get funding for them. They supported the participants in their role as leaders of change in the smart city sphere and helped them acquire new competences in order to jointly create better liveable cities.

We communicated the project directly, following an ongoing smart city needs survey, using the channels of the partners and the project initiator, but also the network of lecturers through planned communication activities carried out by the lecturers – recognised authorities – in their own channels (social media, expert blogs).

In addition, we selected a panel of local government media to which we directed information about the Academy.

Outcomes

Dozens of representatives from more than 60 small and medium-sized cities took part in the Academy. We increased the limit of participants from 50 cities due to the great interest in the project. Several larger cities with a strong focus on smart growth, such as Katowice and Krakow, have also joined the initiative.

Representatives of the cities are in ongoing substantive contact with a team of Orange specialists.

Awards

The “Smart City Leader Academy” project that we implemented for Orange Poland won the Diamond (highest) Award in the ESG Leaders 2022 competition in the educational programme category.

The organisers of the competition are the Warsaw Stock Exchange and PwC Poland among others.

We were awarded in the same category in an earlier edition of the ESG Leaders competition together with the Saint-Gobain Group for the campaign ‘Polish Cities of the Future 2050’. A description of the case study can be found HERE.