Two years after the first EFA Capacity Building meeting, the EFA team came back to Portugal to witness the progress achieved by our member RESPIRA and work with them to identify opportunities to improve raising up the voice of COPD patients in Portugal.
The meeting was held in Lisbon on the 5th October and gathered 11 participants representing RESPIRA’s member organisations active at local level in Portugal.
RESPIRA made relevant improvements during the course of 2015: they have launched a new Facebook page with immediate positive feedback; they have created partnerships with young students, religious associations, and they have built up on impactful projects such as an educational programme in schools aimed at preventing adolescents start smoking. RESPIRA Members also told us their relationship with the scientific community also improved and resulted in the active participation in scientific congresses where RESPIRA presented the results of their own study on the perception of the Portuguese society about respiratory diseases.
At the same time, the economic situation in Portugal has improved, and consequently financial constraints of the organisation are lower than before. Nevertheless, some challenges need to be addressed, such as the meaningful involvement of volunteers, the impact of the organisation at the regional level and the need to diversify the communication channels.
After an open discussion, the training focused on ways to overcome these problems. In particular, for the first time in this project, and following the request of RESPIRA, EFA communication manager Isabel Proano provided a insights in communication, focused on diversifying the messages according to the audiences and on making the best use of social media.
The next follow-up session of EFA’s capacity building project will be held on the 17th of November in Madrid with our Spanish member FENAER.