Blog
COMnGO Final Meeting in Estonia
- January 25, 2020
- Posted by: COMnGO Project
- Category: Journal Testimonies

By Simone Lollini (Perugia, Italy).
Well, I don’t really know how to start writing about this, because it’s almost a two-year experience condensed in few words, and it’s impossible that this piece of writing ends up describing it properly. Anyway, as I already started writing, better keep going.
Estonia was the last step of the project COMnGO, a project that brought amazing people with “Ikea-like” hoodies all around the world talking about communication for NGOs. We couldn’t choose a better location for this evaluation meeting, the outskirt of Tartu, in Estonia, an incredibly flat land that helped developing one of the most used means of communication of all the times, Skype. So we met there, people from 7 different NGOs, 7 countries from 3 continents, together to sum up everything we created during the COMnGO experience.
During the evaluation seminar we had the opportunity to held a final dissemination event, where we put in practice what we learnt during the different training courses. That was really a step forward, from student/apprentice to teacher/facilitator. It was satisfying to see what a big impact COMnGO has been on me, personally, and on the knowledge I have now about communication. I attended three training courses and one study visit before joining the evaluation seminar: more than eighty (80) days spent working and talking about communication. And struggling with WordPress plug-ins. But that’s part of the game.
During these last days of evaluation, we realised how we did since the beginning of the project, how many people we involved during the process and how much materialswe collected on the way. That was the main challenge of the evaluation seminar: putting together all the videos, the exercises, the articles, the links… in a way that people can benefit from those. We run against the clock to put together an online training course that people can use to gain knowledge about communication. A free one, for anyone, from any part of the globe. That has been the main goal of the projectsince the very beginning: share and learn together with the partners in order to give back to the community tools and tips to improve their communication strategies.
We worked hard on that, discussed how to shape of the website, how to implement an user-friendly platform and which contents to promote. The final results can still be improved, but the feeling of setting up an online free training course by merging the experiences and the competences of so many people is really rewarding. I’m very grateful for COMnGO, and for Erasmus+ for making this kind of projects possible.
We know that we can do more, we can do better, and that’s why the evaluation seminar was also about planning the future. Next projects, next challenges and many new people to involve. Because in the end is about communication: learning something without the possibility to share it with others is not really an option.