As communication professionals working in civil society, we are often tasked with designing and implementing strategies that we hope will inform, raise awareness, raise funds, mobilise people to take action and influence decision makers to make changes to better support people.
How we measure the impact and the effectiveness of these activities depends on our communication strategies but at the heart of it, our common goal is to change behaviours and society for the better.
If we are investing in this goal, we need to be mindful of how change happens and it’s usually a combination of intersecting interventions that happen in multiple places. After all:
A problem will not go away simply because someone knows about a behaviour. That awareness has to be translated into an action, a behaviour, to have an impact on the problem.”
Communication and behavioural change
Most of us in the role of communication are not the ones rolling out programmes or projects on the ground, or delivering services or even completing a full funding agreement. So when we design our communications, we usually design for building awareness or shifting perspectives and increasing knowledge. Sometimes we can do a bit more, like engaging in a conversation which leads to a desired, tangible result, or creating a full online journey that can complete a desired action like signing a petition or making an online donation. Communication is an excellent tool for driving more than awareness, it drives action too – especially online communication and digital technologies that can be designed for users to complete an action online and then analysed to see why and how this happened.
Communication is a tool for action
For communication to be seen as a tool for action rather than simply a reporting tool, we need to be able to plan our communication differently. We need to integrate our strategies with programmes and project team’s work and monitoring and evaluation frameworks being used by others in our organisations, projects or campaigns so that everyone can image, plan for and track a full picture of change – from where it starts and where it ends.
Behavioural change specialists in civil society – usually monitoring and evaluation specialists – and communicators are in fact working with the same principles as you can see in the slides here:
Where to from here?
Depending on the circumstances, action may start with a conversation or workshop in a place and then move into a website form, and then move again into a face-to-face conversation or programme. Because of the integrated nature of how relationships and impact occurs, communicators and monitoring and evaluation specialists are in an ideal position to work and plan together. And using simple tools like the one below, you can shift gears on your communication work so that it speaks to shared goals and desired longer term outcomes, and not awareness building.
Integrated planning steps
We have developed a short method for planning your communication in this way. Why not try doing this with others in your organisation who are involved in strategy, ideally your head of programmes or ideally, your M&E specialist. Here are the basic steps, which are listed in our toolkit, which you can download below.
⭐Step 1 – Imagine the longer-term impact-focused goal you want to help bring about.
⭐Step 2 – Within this, define a problem context: What problem are you solving with this goal? Who are you speaking to?
⭐Step 3 – Map out the interventions your organisation, campaign or project will make to bring about this goal.
⭐Step 4 – Define your activities, both programmatic and communication!
⭐Step 5 – List your communication outputs for your communication activities: What actual communication pieces will you develop? How many of these things? (quantities) Where will you publish them?
⭐Step 6 – Define your desired outcomes: What do you want to see as a result of your outputs? Which specific metrics will you be using? And what are your data sources?
