by Emma O’Shaughnessy, 12 July 2024
At Amplify Mobilise Change we are deeply preoccupied with understanding and teaching how nonprofit communication creates long-term positive impact. One way we pursue this is in our blended learning programme, where we work with practitioners on how to plan their communication activities so that they are linked to the same impact goals and change matrix that the rest of their organisation is working towards.
Why we address this pattern
We advocate for this strategy because otherwise communication work risks not being measured according to the same strategic principles and targeted approaches embodied in an organisation or project’s theory of change. This can make communication activities siloed and separate from the outcomes of other important initiatives, like programmes, which are always, unlike communication, mapped out and treated as mechanisms of change, incorporated in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) frameworks.
As a result, communication activities, teams, and communication practice can often sit outside of deeper interrogation and out of deeper narratives of change that organisations embed themselves in to reflect on progress, raise funds, make change, and demonstrate impact.
Challenging, but worthwhile
While we try to untangle the operational reasons why this is so, we focus on building agency and skillsets of communication specialists in our programme, teaching how to use a Theory of Change approach to map out their communication activities and apply this to the way they create and evaluate their work. Even though it’s often challenging to do this, especially if you have never done it before, it’s amazingly effective in helping communication practitioners visualise where their work fits within an organisation and bring that back to other teams and strategic principles around them.
Becoming more integrated avoids siloes
We find this also helps practitioners feel more integrated and less alone in their work. It can create bridges between them, their teams, programme teams, M&E teams and leaders of an organisation or project by helping them speak the same language of change. Ultimately, we do this work because we believe that communication activities are a pivotal lever for creating change and not just a reporting function.
Many nonprofit communication teams that we work with often have unique communication theories of change or strategic goals and they design their content and communication around these. Mostly these goals are internal-facing – operational goals and goals that speak to improving reach and engagement or the quality of a community’s participation online. We find that these goals are not then linked back to the outcomes that the organisation is tracking and reporting on and advocating for in their work and this leaves a gap between practice and knowledge.
Tracking the behavioural change pipeline is a shared effort
Interestingly, we also find that many communication strategies from organisations have a behavioural change goal or aim to achieve behavioural change with certain kinds of communications, for certain target audiences. But, without being integrated back into an M&E framework that has a system for tracking and measuring behavioural change through communication, it’s impossible to know how much the team’s work then contributes to behavioural change. So again, without strategic integration across communication, projects and programmes, one lacks a fluent and cohesive picture of what is working and what isn’t.
Also, in terms of a behavioural change pipeline, without integration, we can’t see the movement of change from one ‘site’ to the next. As we know, awareness building (campaigns, regular content tracking issues, and so on) alone does not change behaviours on the ground. Awareness building opens up the possibilities of someone or a group being willing to change. Usually, other interventions need to be in place to remove the practical barriers to change – interventions like programmes, or direct services for example.
Our work with communication practitioners then helps them to see that what they are trying to bring about first may be awareness, and not behavioural change, and that if they were to measure the effects of this awareness on the ground, they would need to then integrate with data from sources on the ground, statistics and evaluations from their programmes, from their own research or national sources. This becomes essential for measuring the impact of a communication campaign or communication that aims to shift perceptions and thus change behaviours.
Becoming friends with data opens us to shared insights
We teach communication practitioners how to become friendly with data too, how to ask questions, and run their own communication-orientated, exploratory research (small scale, not evidence-based) to help them discover the answers to some of the questions they have around the impact their communication is having. We want communication practitioners to feel confident around data so that they can then engage with M&E frameworks and programme teams and ideally, plan research together that helps everyone understand how communication and programmes or projects intersect and build change, together.
Maybe this is too idealistic, but we have seen how this work shifts thinking and builds agency within communication teams. This is our vision for communication in the sector: that it becomes something that everyone can visualise as a key mechanism for change; that teams across the board can use the same language of change; that communication is seen as a central part of monitoring frameworks, and that the M&E frameworks we use broaden their scope to include the powerful intentional work happening across our sector’s communication channels – online, in print and in conversations.
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