Hi, I'm Pascal, your trainer
Working in communications for global development organizations for 20+ years, I've come to realize that hardly any of the juniors starting in communications positions in development projects are trained in professional communications or have prior experience in this field.
So in my first mini-course, I go into detail on strategy as this is something expected of every communicator and there are often no colleagues with proper know-how in this area to call on.
The Three Sections of the Course
What is a Communications Strategy for a Development Cooperation Project?
This first section of the course looks at the six elements your strategy is composed of, the people you should get on board when you're busy designing it and what kind of resources you need to consider beforehand — which is all totally critical to your success later on.
Setting up Your Project's Communications Strategy
The second section of the course provides hands-on guidance on how to conceptualize a strategy that fits both the typical situation in development as well as your own particular setting. Important points include the definition of concrete goals and not starting with the tools you want to use.
Implementing Your Strategy and Retuning the Approach
The third section of the course covers how to make the selected tools to work together, impact measuring and what it entails that a lot of communications in development targets audiences in donor countries.
Course Outline
How to Set a Communications Strategy for a Development Cooperation Project
- What's special about goal setting in development cooperation (9:21)
- Focus on the audience (7:22)
- Adapt the strategy to your project (14:07)
- Use messages with a purpose (4:54)
- Preparing for the unplannable (2:56)
- Responding to controversial issues (3:43)
- What's a communications strategy in development cooperation not? (4:38)
Get the Look & Feel of the Course
In this three-minute video, I speak more about what's in the course, plus you get a good idea of what the set-up looks like. Have a look!
Do You Really Want Impact?
One word on the impact of communications. We all heard that communications in development cooperation did not bring solid results, and if it did, it was impossible to measure them, never mind attributing them to the communications work carried out.
These problems are caused by unclear goals and metrics as well as a lack of definition of the target groups in the planning phase, plus then not properly focusing on them during implementation. In other words, the problems are not a matter of principle but one of the actual conceptualization and implementation.
The good news is we can sort this out! In this course, I'm going to show you why the interested public is a vague and tautologic notion and why awareness-raising without aiming at triggering some kind of action is a goal that can never cause impact. It's simply illogical.
So if you really want impact, I'm going to show you how to set up tangible goals and start operating professionally. Remember, it's like in sports. If you and your buddies go on the lawn behind your house, you can play ball but you can never win. You don't have proper goals to really score and you're not facing real competition to get more attention than that of your home crowd.
