The Simple Guide to Communication Learnings of a One-Person Team

Let’s assume in a room full of people, we state the following: “70% of children in India study in Government schools, and they do not receive high-quality learning.”

Based on their responses, we can categorize the people in the room into three groups. One of these will comprise of people unfamiliar with the statistic. For them, this is brand new information. Another category will be of people familiar with the statistic.

However, they are unsure of what actions they can take to address it. The third may comprise of people who assume the context and cause of this statistic. As SEF’s communications team, we want to address all these three categories of people. We try to build awareness and understanding of the problem. We share stories of change and clear calls to action. We also advocate for the system, challenge people’s assumptions and create spaces for them to engage with the challenge.

At SEF, we have realized, our role does not stop at sharing the problem statement or how we are solving it. What follows is a strategic plan to build awareness and knowledge of the ‘why,’ a shared understanding of the values we lead with, a lens into the lives of the people we serve, and the vision of a better tomorrow.

Throughout the article, we are sharing questions and prompts that have helped us start our journey of building our communications. We hope it helps you too. So, let’s begin:

• How do people respond to your problem statement?
• How do you want to address them?

Designing Communication

‘Engage, Learn and Grow’ – SEF’s Learning Philosophy: Our communication design process has shifted over the years. We are still in an experimental phase. However, we are committed to engage with different practices, learn from our experiments, and grow with the help of our learnings. Over the last nine years, we have come to anchor our communication on three core questions:

1. What is our purpose?
2. Who is our audience?
3. How do we communicate our purpose to diverse audiences?

SEF | Why
To ensure all children receive high-quality foundational and social-emotional learning inside government schools

Communication Vertical | Why
To be a voice of hope and share the impact of high-quality learning

Communication with a Purpose | Why & What

One of the early mistakes we made in designing our communication plans was seeing our organization’s purpose as synonymous with the communication vertical’s ‘Why’.

This ‘why’ is not over and above the organization, but a natural extension of the same. It enabled us to identify that we want to show a glimpse of the better tomorrow we envision. This glimpse can often get overwhelming.

Hence, we worked on identifying key areas we wanted to focus on. We call them our ‘Pillars of Work.’ These are also the pillars of our communication. These pillars of work are outlined in our ‘Communications Guide,’ a comprehensive document outlining key communication principles and tools at SEF.

This guide caters to internal and external team members. It empowers them to capture stories and insights in alignment with our ‘Pillars of Work’.

Pause & Think

• What do you want your communications vertical to do?
• How do you want your organization to sound? This is your organization’s voice.
• What are your pillars/core areas of work?

Knowing your Audience | Who

In an ideal scenario identifying our audience would be simple. However, for a successful communications strategy, deep diving into your audience’s interests and demographics is a continuous exercise.

We can categorize them into funders, partners and stakeholders. We can also move to nuanced, contextual and personalized categorizations by aligning with their interests and values.

We have built an understanding of our audience through observations and digital media statistics. For example, our audience on LinkedIn likes to learn about educator practices and research, whereas our audience on Instagram likes to stay connected with stories from the ground. However, these audience insights are evolving with continuous data collection. We have kept our communication strategy flexible to respond to these evolving needs.

We cater to unique audiences on digital platforms as well as long-term supporters, partners and government stakeholders. We engage them through diverse channels and facilitate the deepening of understanding and alignment with our pillars of work.

Through conversations and observations, we bucket our audience into four broad categories:

1. Skeptics, who need to be invested in our work and aligned to its purpose;
2. Learners who want to see ground realities and impact to deepen their understanding;
3. Believers who receive consistent updates on our journey to strengthen their belief;
4. Champions who are enthusiastic and active advocates of our work.

Our role is to take our audience from where they are to becoming champions of our vision. Hence, we design personalized communication aligned to their journeys. Adding depth and personalization to communication design is a massive time investment with equal returns to the relevance of your communication.

Pause & Think

• Who is your key audience?
• What do they want to learn?
• What is the best way to enable their learning?

Data Driven Decisions | How

The above two exercises will make us realize that there are multiple ways of sharing our stories and multiple stories to share. Modern media has spoilt us for choices that often depend on algorithms. However, data and gut have both played an important role in our strategy. Data has been everything from engagement numbers on social media to self-analysis, feedback, and insights we receive from the audience. This quantitative and qualitative data informs small decisions like leveraging videos and carousels instead of static posts to using physical reports and artefacts to communicate with our government stakeholders. And, you can do this without paid software and complicated excels. The sky is blue, pick the metrics you want to track, and practices you want to test in your communications.

For example, we started setting hypotheses on different communications tactics we planned to use in the quarter. At the end of the quarter, we came back, shared our hypothesis analysis, and always learned something new about our purpose and audience.

Commitments for the Future

Development communication is a developing area of expertise, and we are learning with it. There are many gaps in the sector’s strategic approach to communications and even more possibilities. Here are some things we are excited to do and see in the future.

Stakeholders at the Centre

Our communication goals may vary from building awareness to shifting mindsets. However, what remains constant is the centrality of the people we serve. Just as we design a lesson plan keeping the student at the center, communication is designed keeping in mind the audience. Instead of sharing the impact of a new language curriculum on children’s reading levels, we want to share a child’s or teacher’s experience with the curriculum. What did they see, think and feel when teaching and learning through this curriculum. Integrating human-centred design into our communications strategy has completely transformed how we look at the field.

Building a Learning Community

Most small to medium sized non-profit organizations today have a small (read one member) team for communication. These individuals come with diverse skillsets of writing, content and visual design, product design, content creation, filmmaking and lot more. And, the field is based on experiential learning, with individuals relying on the organization’s financial bandwidth and project priorities to learn and implement new things. Naturally we risk a learning stagnation as professionals and individuals in the field.

Hypothesis
Our LinkedIn audience is inclined towards practice and research based learning pieces
Next Steps
Create learning posts on three classroom practices that have shown a positive impact in our classrooms
Learning
Proven right. Given the high volume of educator audience, even text-heavy posts led to high engagement. Including voices of teachers and students made it even more relevant.

Pause & Think

• What are the metrics you consider when planning communications?
• What are the practices you want to test through your communication practices?

Waiting for courses designed to enable our learning in the Indian landscape is an option. However, we see immense potential in the collective of non-profit professionals across the country to tackle this challenge. Therefore, we hope to engage, learn and grow with other professionals in the field.

Balancing Hopes and Challenges

“It’s bad, but it’s getting better.”
Hans Rosling is a renowned physician who wrote ‘Factfullness’, a book that uses data to share 8 facts about the world, with the hope to make you realize that the world is getting better. This is where the narrative of his book challenges you, because it proves that the world is getting better, but at the same time you can see it’s not the best.

Pause & Think

What is your commitment for the future of development communications in India?

As development communication professionals, we face this challenge every day. And we owe it to our teams and stakeholders to always balance challenges with hope. Celebrate big and small things and highlight challenges to build context. Because it may be bad. But thanks to people we work with every day, it is getting better.

We will be happy to learn and grow with you!