Greetings from ENCHANT’s project leader

Dear all,

As summer is approaching, ENCHANT is launching its first newsletter roughly half a year into the project’s lifetime. Since the digital kick-off in October 2020, the various partners in ENCHANT have been busy consolidating the consortium, handing in the first deliverables, and facilitating for actions ahead in several of the work packages. That involves not only setting the projects work structure, but even more importantly, developing a common understanding of what the interventions to increase energy efficiency will be and how to implement them. I think that due to the excellent work of all consortium partners, we are in an excellent position now to deliver the ambitious targets that the project has set for itself.

The project’s webpage is up and running, presenting project information hopefully interesting also for an audience extending beyond the project partners, presenting ENCHANT’s cases, in addition to news and tips for reducing our energy consumption necessary for a green transition. To ensure information is accessible to all involved parties, the page has some sections in the local languages of the intervention countries and will in the following months be filled with findings from the project.

User partners in ENCHANT have a very prominent role. They are not only representatives from the non-academic world as is often the case in similar research projects, but they are core actors in the project’s data collection through an advanced methodological setup (randomised control trials – or RCT for short), to literally millions of European citizens. ENCHANT’s design has the non-academic user partners responsible for choosing interventions and communicating them through the channels they normally use, thus testing knowledge from behavioural science in the real world. The experienced and renowned academic partners are responsible for planning the implementation of interventions according to methodological standards as well as measuring their effects.

The “translation” from real life to academic insight and vice versa is through this novel design already integrated in the project and part of our daily work. The dialogue between the academic and user partners is thereby ensuring relevance and transferability, or in other words, bridging the gap from knowledge to impact.

This fall will be a busy but also very exciting time for everyone involved in ENCHANT, with the implementation of interventions across Europe. Until then, I hope you will all have a peaceful and covid-free summer.