Armenian municipalities improve communication skills at the CoM East training

The fourth CoM East communication training in Armenia brought together 30 participants from 16 communities in Yerevan on 9-10 March, expanding its programme this year to cover community branding, fact-checking, and countering climate disinformation alongside Covenant of Mayors East promotion.

The programme was designed for press secretaries and communication specialists of signatory communities, building on skills gained in previous editions. Topics were chosen to give participants a complete set of tools: from shaping a community’s green identity to engaging residents on climate action and navigating the local media landscape.

Susana Martins, Coordinator of the Environment and Climate Change Programmes of the EU Delegation to Armenia, said the training was designed to build skills that translate directly into community action.

“In a world facing climate challenges, it is crucial to clearly communicate information about the potential adverse impacts of extreme climate events to the population. As community representatives, it is your responsibility to understand the complexity of climate change and share this knowledge with your community members to encourage appropriate action. Strategic communication enables you to convey clear messages that lead to concrete actions. Knowledge of fact-checking tools is important because it allows you to combat disinformation and the spread of false information,” said Susana Martins.

Armen Harutyunyan, General Director of the Union of Communities of Armenia, pointed to a gap the training series aims to close. “Local authorities often implement energy-saving projects that, over time, run into a wall of misinformation and public ignorance,” he said. “This series of seminars is exactly about that: how to make the community an active participant in the project.”

The two-day programme covered five topic areas:

• Community branding and green identity (Nvard Melkonyan, Public Relations Expert) — participants worked on translating community identity into a communication strategy, with a practical exercise on defining brand elements.
• Leadership image in local governance (Nvard Melkonyan) — sessions covered how a leader’s public image functions as a communication resource and how to align it with the community’s green brand.
• Fact-checking and countering climate disinformation (Tirayr Muradyan, Fact-Checking Expert Journalist) — participants learned tools to critically assess information before sharing it, with a focus on environmental initiatives and local climate policies.
• Communicating climate actions to citizens (Arshaluis Mgdesyan, Expert on Interview and Press Conference Techniques) — sessions addressed how to incorporate the CoM and the green agenda into everyday media engagement, avoid greenwashing, and clarify communication roles between community leaders and their teams.
• Strategic communication through the OASIS framework (Artak Shakaryan, Expert on Strategic Communication) — the session introduced the Objectives, Audience, Strategy, Implementation and Scoring (OASIS) framework and its application in local governance communication.

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The training closed with a simulation exercise. Participants took on the roles of mayors and press secretaries of four municipalities, tasked with presenting their Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs) at a mock press conference. Other participants and trainers played journalists and residents, asking critical questions.