Funding Formula Stage 4

Communications Strategies for Member Associations

Five communications strategy lessons from successful African NGOs

In 2008, Ushahidi, a technology platform, was developed to map election violence in Kenya. Since then, it has served as a hub where events are reported from communities around the world. The open source platform has also been adapted to fit different situations where people struggle to gather information — from political protests to natural disasters.

Whether amplifying the voices of communities around the world or providing access to health care and education opportunities for underserved communities, it is important for organizations to create visibility for their brand and get traction for messages about their work.

But this is not always easy for those working in global development due to a number of  limiting factors, including tight budgets. Here, successful NGOs that work in Africa share their tips.

1. Don’t forget the why

NGOs need to be more intentional and engage audiences with the content they distribute across communications channels instead of just using it as click bait to increase their fan base.

So many organisations are caught up with how many Twitter followers they have or how to get something to go viral. A common mistake that NGOs make is losing sight of the “why” behind their communications effort. Communications teams need to take a step back and ask how they can put the client first — and then devise a communications strategy that honors that.

For some NGOs this could mean using different social media channels to amplify the voices of clients, by sharing stories about their activities with the goal of getting their target audience to understand that women should come first in global poverty solutions.

2. Know your audience

To avoid creating campaigns in a vacuum, it is important to for an NGO to know their audience and build a relationship with them. This also makes it easy to start conversations with them on issues that matter.

The team at Ushahidi created a chat function on their website that connects users directly to an employee who can answer their questions. The feedback Ushahidi receives through the conversations not only helps them know their audience better, it also helps them get feedback that they use to improving their products and services.

3. Generate local content to tell compelling stories

About six years ago, the Ubuntu Education Fund made a decision to move away from highly restricted grant funding, which meant they had to be more creative about how to raise money.

Telling compelling stories about their work helped them gain access to funding opportunities. But the goal of their storytelling goes beyond fundraising; they also use it to engage the global development community by creating thought-leadership pieces in both written and podcast form to shape discussions around philanthropy.

In an effort to tell compelling stories, NGOs need to avoid being overly contrived. Although language barriers may necessitate that stories to be told by another it is still important to collect primary recordings of a local person telling the story. This might require investing resources to employ a professional storyteller, but most of the time allowing local staff who understand the issues to coordinate the project will suffice. At Ubuntu more than 90 percent of the content the organization produces is created by local staff.

4. Look beyond the communications team

Gaining traction for a message is not a task solely for the communications department. Ushahidi has its team spread across about nine countries so employees across a variety of teams are often charged with communications tasks.

When an event is taking place in a time zone where a staff member is located, the person takes proactive steps to respond to or generate content to spread the word.

5. It doesn’t have to cost a lot

Some NGOs shy away from taking on projects that would increase their brand awareness for fear of it costing a lot of money. But because the internet has democratized how information is shared, having a dedicated communications budget is not necessary. A little can go a long way.

At Ubuntu, they have learned to recycle and reuse materials from previous projects to reduce the cost of creating new resources from scratch.

“A picture might look old to us because we have seen them before, but we forget that it is new to everyone who visits the website for the first time or encounters that image for the first time,” staff said.

Instead of hiring experts, communications teams can look to crowdsource ideas from others within the organization.

When you have a creative team, ideas can come from anyone, including the CEO.