towards a global communications approach

Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop

#CommsStrategy

30 May 2012

“Communications for Change”

Towards a global approach

Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

Today’s workshop


The strategic context: Our next 5 years’ ambitions

The ActionAid culture

The role of communications, brand & its value

How we tackled the challenge

The solution: A Work in Progress


The Strategic Context Communications in the Global Strategy:

Role of communications against objectives Delivering on Key Change Promises

Making our communications more effective across

the federation & shifting from operational to strategic

Mapping global, country & communications inputs: Actioning Country Activity Plans

Multi-country Campaigning & Fundraising


The ActionAid Culture

A federation of equals

Rights based activism & programming

Collaborative & consultative Inward looking & directorate focused

Producers & publishers


Communications

& The Brand: Challenges

Investment in the current climate, pressure on budgets

everywhere Demonstrate value of comms

Lack of coherence across federation - ActionAid brand

not seen as strategic asset + visual ID applied in different ways

Improving capacity & capability of countries

How doe we support the fundraising community?


Evidence for change: Comms activity Snapshot


Tackling our challenges Manage our culture & use it to our advantage

Building consensus & business cases

Adopt a Strategic Communications Framework: Key principles across our communications activities

Consultancy, capacity, capability, commissioning The power of aggregation

Reinforce insight driven, audience-centric, action-oriented

comms through creation of compelling & engaging comms

Develop a distinctive brand identity & positioning

Build capacity & capability across our network

Shared approaches, more cost-effective with the infrastructure to deliver, monitor & measure our activities


Why we communicate

Why Communications for Change?


Communications is more than a function for documenting or

promoting our work. It is a part of the solution to poverty and

injustice.

Communications for Change means that all of our work must

be geared toward making change happen. We will do this

through working together to promoting active citizenship –

because if people are the change, they must be empowered –

in their communities, nationally and internationally – to

challenge themselves and others to act.


Communications to make change happen in action

Embrace our theory of change

Bring it to life: “Punching above our weight”:

(Developing & sharing core brand identity,

best practice)

Model & articulate social change

communications

Orchestrate our work for optimum impact &

effect

Make strategic comms part of BAU, enabling

sharing

Measure, learn, improve effectiveness

Provide “the right tools for the job”


What’s the value of brand?


Why brand is valuable & important

A brand is more than a visual identity: the name, the logo and graphic design

used by an organisation. A brand reflects the ‘impression’ held in the minds

of external stakeholders - it creates greater credibility and trust on which to

build a two-way relationship with them.

An NGO brand is built on strong beliefs and values which lie at the heart of

what makes an organisation different. A brand should permeate throughout

the entire organisation, be integral to its culture & play an active role in

developing organisational cohesion.

A strong brand plays a crucial role in acting as a shortcut for donors or

partners when making a decision to donate or support a particular charity.

Brand is therefore an important strategic asset for any non-profit

organisation.


Building our brand identity

Developing a process to isolate a core identity

Refining & articulating an “essence”

Working across all our key disciplines

Consulting, testing & refining

Creating core assets, using “Open Source”

dissemination methodology

Measuring impact & effectiveness

Embedding, developing and improving

Developing our Insight


CONSUMER INSIGHT

Poverty is a trap created and sustained through unjust systems

BRAND INSIGHT

ActionAid works with people to escape poverty by enabling them to achieve their human rights

TRANSLATE TO BRAND ESSENCE

“You are here”


Our brand essence

Our brand essence is at the heart of ActionAid’s work in alleviating poverty and injustice. Our brand essence harnesses the latent power everyone has within them - it’s about the individual and collective force of people creating change for themselves and for the benefit of their community.

It’s about the ‘power’ within our staff, supporters and partners who also play their part in creating purposeful action to end poverty and injustice - whether that’s through communications, campaigning, fundraising or giving.


Capacity & capability

A global web platform

More cost-effective than any individual payment

platform, includes: Payment platform

Supporter management

Email and e-campaigning

Supporter experience

Flexibly for creation of bespoke campaigns, fully

integrated for seamless user journeys with jointly

created campaigns, donations, supporter experience

Enhances brand coherence

Training skill-shares, ‘domestic focus, global benefit’

Putting it all together


Global buy in & adoption: Making it Easy & Beneficial

“Why wouldn’t you?”

Guidance on narrative, tone of voice and approach

rather than “Brand Book”

The Open Source model: sharing key assets

Finding, encouraging, supporting early adopters

Sharing success: Relentless Forward Progress

The ultimate solution: A Work in Progress

Test Learn Refine Model


“Can we achieve our ambitions if we stay the same?”

Thank you

towards a global communications approach

Business

role of communications

country communications

global strategy

progressmission critical

activitiesmission critical

communicatemission critical

theory of change

key change promises