A reflective start to the Open Network year
The first Open Network session of the year opened with a timely and deeply practical conversation for South Africa’s communications and social impact sector: how do we use AI in ways that strengthen connection, rather than simply speed up production? The session, titled AI for Social Impact, invited communicators, leaders and practitioners to think carefully about the role of artificial intelligence in our work, not as a replacement for human judgement, but as a tool that can help us communicate with more relevance, empathy, strategy and care.
The guest speaker, Mathabo Sekhonyana, brought both credibility and warmth into this conversation. Mathabo is an award-winning marketing specialist, creative, digital strategist, public speaker and storyteller. She was recognised as one of the Mail & Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans in 2024 and as a Rising Star at the Africa Career Summit. Her experience spans leading South African brands and social impact work, with specialist areas including 360 marketing strategy, digital and AI-integrated marketing, social media marketing, public relations and CSI.
From visibility to trust
One of the strongest reflections from the session was that communication is not just about producing more content or becoming more visible. As the opening framing reminded us, “communications is not just about visibility. It’s a core intervention that helps people and organisations work towards shared goals.”
This idea sits at the heart of the AMC modules too. Communication work in civil society must help build awareness, motivate participation, help people act, and sustain long-term relationships. In other words, communication is not decoration around the “real work”. It is one of the ways change happens.
Mathabo challenged participants to move beyond the old model of “spray and pray”, where organisations make people aware of an issue and hope they will care enough to act. Instead, she encouraged a deeper journey: from awareness, to understanding, to trust, to motivation, to action, and eventually to advocacy or support. As she put it, “awareness alone is not impact. It’s really the start of the conversation.”
For South African communicators, this is a vital lesson. Our audiences are not passive recipients of information. They are people with histories, pressures, hopes, languages, fears and motivations. They act when communication becomes meaningful to them.
AI as a partner, not a replacement
The session’s most useful teaching was that AI should be treated as a communication partner, not a replacement for communicators. Mathabo was clear that AI can help us think, listen, create and improve. It can help us find patterns, draft content, adapt messages, repurpose material and test clarity. But it cannot replace the human layer.
As she reminded the group, “AI is only as good as you are.” It does not automatically know what is sensitive, culturally relevant, truthful or appropriate. It responds to the quality of the thinking, context and judgement we bring into the process.
This is especially important in the impact sector. AI may help us write faster, but it cannot know the lived reality of a young person trying to move from school into work, a caregiver navigating public services, or a community member deciding whether to trust an organisation. That knowledge comes from listening, relationship-building, audience research and experience on the ground.
Better prompts begin with better thinking
A practical takeaway from Mathabo’s presentation was the importance of strong prompting. A weak prompt such as “write a press release about our youth programme” may produce a fast but generic result. A stronger prompt gives AI the role, audience, context, tone, purpose, South African relevance, call to action and ethical boundaries.
Mathabo shared that when she works with AI, she may spend “30 minutes to an hour” shaping the first prompt so that the tool has the same information she is working with. This was a powerful reminder that AI does not remove strategic work. It demands it.
The learning here is simple but important: the better our thinking, the better our use of AI. Communicators should not simply accept the first output. We should question it. Is it accurate? Is it respectful? Does it avoid jargon? Does it overclaim impact? Does it sound like us? Does it speak to the people we are trying to reach?
Audience insight must remain central
The AMC audience mapping modules remind us that we communicate with real people, not abstract “beneficiaries”, “donors” or “stakeholders”. Audience research helps us understand what people need from us, what motivates them to engage, what barriers they face, and how they consume information.
This connected strongly with Mathabo’s point that AI can shorten the time it takes to find and organise insights, but those insights must still be overlaid with “lived experience”, what we see on the ground, and the stories we receive from our audiences.
For communicators in South Africa, this means AI should not flatten people into generic audience segments. It should help us ask better questions and listen more carefully. It should support plain language, home-language sensitivity, clearer calls to action and more respectful storytelling.
Care, ethics and accountability
The session also surfaced an important caution: faster communication must not become careless communication. In a time where AI can produce confident-sounding content quickly, communicators must strengthen fact-checking, consent, quote checking and review processes.
This is part of healthy and safe content practice. We need to protect the dignity of the people whose stories we tell. We need to avoid feeding sensitive personal information into tools without care. We need to be transparent when errors happen. Trust is built not only by what we say, but by how responsibly we say it.
What we carry forward
This first Open Network session offered a hopeful but grounded message. AI is not something the sector needs to fear, but it is also not something we should use without reflection. It can help under-resourced teams work with more speed and structure. It can support drafting, research, analysis and creativity. But the communicator remains responsible for meaning, ethics, tone and trust.
The real invitation from the session was not to automate our humanity away. It was to become more intentional. To use AI in service of connection. To create content that helps people understand, feel respected, trust us more deeply and move towards meaningful action.
That is the work of communication for impact. And it remains deeply human.
Not yet part of our community? Sign up today to our email database for workshops, invites and more!
