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The European Parliament uses Live Center for real-time coverage

Case study

The European Parliament is the EU’s only directly elected institution, with 705 members representing over 500 million citizens across 28 member states. The 2019 European elections were among the most highly anticipated public sector events, generating a massive demand for real-time election coverage.

To meet this challenge, the Directorate for Campaigns—part of the EU’s Directorate-General for Communication—turned to Live Center to provide live election updates in multiple languages, ensuring broad accessibility for EU citizens.

Building on Live Center’s proven success in delivering real-time election coverage for media companies, the European Parliament leveraged the platform to create 24 unique live blogs, managed by 30+ editors. Each blog was customized for the official languages of EU countries, while also meeting strict accessibility requirements—a testament to Live Center’s flexibility and adaptability.

Making public information more accessible

Because the live blogs were run on an official EU website, accessibility for readers with disabilities was a key consideration. Required attributes include being easily navigable and easy to understand for all readers. To support this requirement, Live Center was updated according to W3C standards and guidelines for screen readers and other accessibility-supporting devices up to an AA standard under the W3C WAI guidelines. These updates became available in Live Center’s live blogs for all our customers thanks to the EU’s election-blogging initiative.

Making elections more engaging: Visual and interactive

The Directorate’s coverage started by sharing a variety of key background information about:

  • Details about the election itself
  • Specific voting schedules for different countries
  • The importance of citizens’ active participation in the voting process

The impetus for going beyond static blogging and choosing to use live blogging was to create more opportunities for engagement. Live blogging enabled the Directorate to create content that included but expanded on simple text. With live blogging, they could add videos from different video platforms and social media posts, such as Tweets, Instagram content, Facebook posts, etc., to create a more visual and engaging live feed that reflects the “live” and real-time nature of live blogging.

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