I recently reviewed the budget for a €4.8 million Horizon Europe project. The line item for "Communication, dissemination, and exploitation" was €12,000. That's 0.25% of the total.

The project involves 14 partners across 9 countries, working on a technology that could reduce industrial carbon emissions by 15%. The research is genuinely important. The results will be genuinely significant. And the consortium has allocated less to telling anyone about it than they've allocated to catering for their quarterly consortium meetings.

This isn't unusual. I see it in project after project. The dissemination budget is whatever was left after all the research costs were covered — usually a number that looks reasonable to a scientist (€10,000–20,000) but is hopelessly inadequate for meaningful public communication.

What Your Dissemination Budget Actually Needs to Cover

Article 17 of the Horizon Europe Grant Agreement doesn't just require a project website and a few tweets. It requires you to "ensure that the public is informed about the action's results and their expected impact." That's a meaningful obligation. Meeting it properly requires more than a final deliverable PDF uploaded to the Participant Portal.

Here's what effective public communication actually costs:

A professional project magazine: £5,000–7,000

This isn't a newsletter. It's a 16–24 page, professionally written and designed publication that explains your project's goals, methods, and results to a general audience. It features interviews with consortium partners, case studies of the research in action, and clear explanations of why the work matters. It carries the EU emblem, complies with Article 17, and gives you something tangible to distribute at conferences, send to policymakers, and hand to anyone who asks what your project actually does.

Most projects don't budget for a magazine because they don't know it's an option. But it's the single most effective dissemination tool available — a physical object that travels further and lasts longer than any website or social media post.

A well-written project website: £3,000–8,000

Not a WordPress template filled with technical jargon. A site that explains the project in clear language, with pages optimised for different audiences — policymakers, industry, researchers, the press. The content matters more than the platform, but you need both.

Professional photography: £1,500–3,000

Stock photos of people in lab coats holding beakers of coloured water don't communicate anything. Real photographs of your researchers doing real work — that communicates authenticity. A half-day shoot with a professional photographer at one of your partner institutions produces images you'll use across all your communications for years.

Press and media outreach: £2,000–5,000

Writing press materials that journalists will actually read. Briefing researchers for interviews. Pitching stories to specific journalists at specific publications. Following up. This is skilled work, and it takes time. A single successful placement in a major publication is worth more than every tweet your project will ever post.

Policy briefing: £2,000–4,000

If your research has policy implications — and most Horizon Europe projects do — you need a briefing document that translates your findings into language policymakers can use. This isn't a technical summary. It's a political document: what we found, why it matters, what should happen next. It needs to be written by someone who understands both the research and the policy process.

Video content: £3,000–10,000

A 2–3 minute project overview video, professionally shot and edited, is one of the most versatile dissemination assets you can produce. It lives on your website, plays at conferences, circulates on social media, and communicates your project in a format that requires no reading effort from the audience.

The Real Cost of Doing It Properly

If you add up the essentials — magazine, website, photography, press outreach — you're looking at £14,000–23,000. For a full package that includes video and policy briefing, £20,000–35,000.

On a €5 million project, that's 0.4%–0.8% of the total budget. It's a rounding error — and it's the difference between a project whose results are seen and understood, and a project whose results sit in a technical deliverable that nobody reads.

Why Projects Underfund This

There are three reasons, and they're all fixable.

1. Scientists don't value dissemination. This isn't a criticism — it's a structural reality. Researchers are trained to value publications in academic journals. Public communication feels like a distraction, or worse, like dumbing down their work. The result is that dissemination budgets are set by people who don't believe in dissemination, and the number reflects their scepticism.

The fix: involve a communication professional in the proposal-writing stage. Let them explain what effective dissemination looks like and what it costs. When researchers see examples of what's possible — a professional magazine, a well-written website, a policy briefing that actually gets read — their expectations change.

2. The budget is set before anyone thinks about communication. The default Horizon Europe workflow: define the research, cost the research, allocate partners, and then — at the end, when the budget is nearly exhausted — ask "what about dissemination?" The answer, inevitably, is "whatever's left."

The fix: make dissemination a first-class budget line, not an afterthought. Set the communication budget at the start, alongside the research costs, and protect it.

3. Nobody knows what good dissemination costs. Most researchers have never commissioned a professional magazine, hired a science writer, or briefed a photographer. They have no reference point for what these things should cost. So they guess — and they guess low, because in the absence of information, people default to the lowest number that doesn't feel absurd.

The fix: this article. And conversations with communication professionals who can give you real numbers based on real projects.

What Happens When You Underinvest

I've seen projects spend €4 million on research and €8,000 on communication. The research produced important results. The communication produced a website nobody visited, a Twitter account with 200 followers, and a final deliverable PDF that the project officer read once and filed.

The research mattered. But nobody outside the consortium knew it mattered, because nobody outside the consortium knew about it. The communication budget failed at its only job: communicating.

This isn't just a missed opportunity. It's a failure of the project's obligation under Article 17, and — more importantly — a failure to the taxpayers who funded the work. They paid for research that could have informed policy, shaped public debate, and improved lives. They deserved to know about it.

A Sensible Budget Recommendation

For a typical Horizon Europe project with a total budget of €3–7 million, I recommend allocating €20,000–35,000 to communication and dissemination. This covers a professional magazine, a well-written website, press outreach, photography, and a policy briefing. For larger projects (€7 million+), €35,000–60,000 is appropriate.

These numbers represent 0.5%–1% of the total budget. They are not extravagant. They are the minimum required to do the job properly. Anything less, and you're not communicating your results — you're just producing materials that demonstrate compliance without achieving impact.

At Stokel Publishing, we help Horizon Europe projects communicate their results to the public — through magazines, websites, press outreach, and policy briefings. We know what it costs and we know what works. If you're preparing a proposal, talk to us before you set the dissemination budget. Getting the number right at the start is much easier than trying to do good communication with a budget that was never designed to support it.