Digital Story Doing for Local Tourism

Tourism is among the key drivers for socio-economic progress and contributes to employment and economic growth, as well as to empower rural, peripheral or less developed areas. COVID-19 has significantly affected tourism sector, according to UNWTO Europe had experienced a 70% decrease in international tourists’ arrivals. As a side effect of the COVID crisis digitalization and online presence became vital for any type of business. Unfortunately, local tourism businesses of rural areas are facing a “double digital divide”. On the supply side, they are still lagging behind in terms of the provision of NGA infrastructure, on the demand side, many rural areas lack the basic skills and knowledge of the potential of digital technology so that even if the ‘digital highways’ are in place, they may remain under- exploited in terms of service provision, business use, or customer take up. Rural areas and local tourism businesses shouldn’t be left behind. The project “Digital Story Doing for Local Tourism” was created to support small and medium tourism enterprises in their digitalization efforts, support them in their efforts to share online their businesses’ philosophy and convert their values into action.

The project was designed to enable “Storydoers” to develop: * Storydoing skills: digital narrative skills for digital and social media platforms; * Digital competences: to reduce the digital dividing of local tourism businesses of rural areas; * Social competences: for community engagement and sustainable development of rural areas. For this reason the project produced free educational resources to teach storydoing skills for: *Improving the competitiveness of rural businesses that operate in tourism and related sectors; *Developing the capacities of rural businesses to design and promote sustainable local tourism experiences based on Storydoing. The primary target group consists of entrepreneurs and workers, aspiring storydoers, of local tourism businesses of rural areas: TA & TO, Small Hotel Accommodation & Guest Houses,Restaurants, Tour & Mountain Guides, Transport companies, Museums, Other local tourist services like farms, bakeries, breweries, etc. The project targets also supporting organizations of rural entrepreneurship: incubators, intermediaries organization and many others.

Main activities implemented by the project: *project management and communications, which include 3 transnational project meetings *project result 1 Digital Story Doing for Local Tourism Framework *project result 2 StorydoersTraining Combo *project result 3 Storydoers Handbook * multiplication events

*establishing cooperation between 6 organisations in 5 European countries * 3 transnational project meetings in Bulgaria, Spain and Belgium *development of numerous templates and documents supporting the project implementation like: contracts with all partners, Quality and Impact Evaluation Plan and Report, Communication Plan and Report, detailed time frame of the project, *project result 1 development of the document Digital Story Doing for Local Tourism Framework in English *project result 2 development of 16 modules part of the StorydoersTraining Combo in English and all the languages of the partnership: Bulgaria, Italian, Spanish, French and German *project result 3 development of the Storydoers Handbook in English and all the languages of the partnership: Bulgaria, Italian, Spanish, French and German * multiplication events: organizing 4 national events in Bulgaria (2), Italy and Spain and one big international event in Brussels * communication with different stakeholders through online publications in social media, newsletters, direct meetings * https://storydoers.eu/ * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Storydoers-113033758069204 * Twitter: https://twitter.com/StorydoersE * https://www.linkedin.com/company/storydoers/