Territorial communication as tool to promote the territorial development: Calabria and Saint Francesco from Paola project

In a global context where interchanges are facilitated by always newer and newer technologies as the actual one, territorial communication became of strategic relevance for the territory, because it can promote and facilitate territorial development. The aim of this particular kind of communication is to attract more financial flows in the territory through the valorisation of its own characteristics; financial flows that could be meant as tourism, industries, research centre and so on. Territorial communication wants to create a territorial image through diffusion of its main characteristics to differentiate its own offer from the others’. It supplies information, underlines the environmental peculiarities and creates interests to the target audience. Its persuasive function plays a key role in this kind of communication, especially in the choice process of tourist destination: this is particularly influenced by several factors: the image of the tourist product and the one of the environment, by geographical, socio - cultural and economic information. To encourage tourism to the environment is needed an effective communication strategy. New ICT, computer-mediated communication systems can effort in a significant way the efficiency of the territorial communication giving new tools, easy to integrate, decreasing time spent to reach target audience and augmenting the diffusion of information, telematics facilitate evaluation ways and measurements of the efficiency of communication and of advertisements. Territorial Communication can be realized through the classical distribution channel (Tv advertisements, brochure, magazine and so on) and even using new channel as Internet: it is possible to present the territory in the net, building websites and portals related to it, data warehouse with all needed information, 3D reconstruction of places to give the final user the possibility to live an immersive experience to influence him/her to visit the environment live. The aim of this paper is to show how a good territorial communication can promote the environment development. Particularly we are going to show the example of Saint Francesco from Paola project, in which, because of His 5th century anniversary of birth, Calabria Region is communicating through cultural manifestation, fairs, religious event, to develop economic, cultural and tourist background.