The document summarizes a workshop on crafting a communications strategy for ActionAid. It discusses developing a strategic communications framework with key principles to apply across activities. It emphasizes building capacity and coherence across countries by adopting shared approaches and infrastructure. It also covers establishing a distinctive brand identity and positioning through defining a core essence of "You are here" and developing global assets to promote this identity.

1. Mission Critical: Crafting
Your Communications
Strategy Workshop
30 May 2012
#CommsStrategy

2. “Communications for Change”
Towards a global approach
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

3. Today’s workshop
 The strategic context: Our next 5 years’ ambitions
 The ActionAid culture
 The role of communications, brand & its value
 How we tackled the challenge
 The solution: A Work in Progress
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

4. The Strategic Context
 Communications in the Global Strategy:
 Role of communications against objectives
 Delivering on Key Change Promises
 Making our communications more effective across
the federation & shifting from operational to strategic
 Mapping global, country & communications inputs:
 Actioning Country Activity Plans
 Multi-country Campaigning & Fundraising
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

5. The ActionAid Culture
 A federation of equals
 Rights based activism & programming
 Collaborative & consultative
 Inward looking & directorate focused
 Producers & publishers
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

6. Communications
& The Brand: Challenges
 Investment in the current climate, pressure on budgets
everywhere
 Demonstrate value of comms
 Lack of coherence across federation - ActionAid brand
not seen as strategic asset + visual ID applied in
different ways
 Improving capacity & capability of countries
 How doe we support the fundraising community?
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

7. Evidence for change: Comms activity Snapshot
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

8. Tackling our challenges
 Manage our culture & use it to our advantage
 Building consensus & business cases
 Adopt a Strategic Communications Framework:
 Key principles across our communications activities
 Consultancy, capacity, capability, commissioning
 The power of aggregation
 Reinforce insight driven, audience-centric, action-oriented
comms through creation of compelling & engaging comms
 Develop a distinctive brand identity & positioning
 Build capacity & capability across our network
 Shared approaches, more cost-effective with the
infrastructure to deliver, monitor & measure our activities
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

9. Why we communicate
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

10. Why Communications for Change?
Communications is more than a function for documenting or
promoting our work. It is a part of the solution to poverty and
injustice.
Communications for Change means that all of our work must
be geared toward making change happen. We will do this
through working together to promoting active citizenship –
because if people are the change, they must be empowered –
in their communities, nationally and internationally – to
challenge themselves and others to act.
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

11. Communications to make change
happen in action
 Embrace our theory of change
 Bring it to life: “Punching above our weight”:
(Developing & sharing core brand identity,
best practice)
 Model & articulate social change
communications
 Orchestrate our work for optimum impact &
effect
 Make strategic comms part of BAU, enabling
sharing
 Measure, learn, improve effectiveness
 Provide “the right tools for the job”
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

12. What’s the value of brand?
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

13. Why brand is valuable & important
A brand is more than a visual identity: the name, the logo and graphic design
used by an organisation. A brand reflects the ‘impression’ held in the minds
of external stakeholders - it creates greater credibility and trust on which to
build a two-way relationship with them.
An NGO brand is built on strong beliefs and values which lie at the heart of
what makes an organisation different. A brand should permeate throughout
the entire organisation, be integral to its culture & play an active role in
developing organisational cohesion.
A strong brand plays a crucial role in acting as a shortcut for donors or
partners when making a decision to donate or support a particular charity.
Brand is therefore an important strategic asset for any non-profit
organisation.
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

14. Building our brand identity
 Developing a process to isolate a core identity
 Refining & articulating an “essence”
 Working across all our key disciplines
 Consulting, testing & refining
 Creating core assets, using “Open Source”
dissemination methodology
 Measuring impact & effectiveness
 Embedding, developing and improving
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

15. Developing our Insight
CONSUMER INSIGHT
Poverty is a trap created and sustained through unjust systems
BRAND INSIGHT
ActionAid works with people to escape poverty by enabling
them to achieve their human rights
TRANSLATE TO BRAND ESSENCE
“You are here”
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

16. Our brand essence
Our brand essence is at the heart of ActionAid’s work in
alleviating poverty and injustice.
Our brand essence harnesses the latent power everyone
has within them - it’s about the individual and collective
force of people creating change for themselves and for
the benefit of their community.
It’s about the ‘power’ within our staff, supporters and
partners who also play their part in creating purposeful
action to end poverty and injustice - whether that’s
through communications, campaigning, fundraising or
giving.
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

17. Capacity & capability
A global web platform
 More cost-effective than any individual payment
platform, includes:
 Payment platform
 Supporter management
 Email and e-campaigning
 Supporter experience
 Flexibly for creation of bespoke campaigns, fully
integrated for seamless user journeys with jointly
created campaigns, donations, supporter experience
 Enhances brand coherence
 Training skill-shares, ‘domestic focus, global benefit’
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

18. Putting it all together
 Global buy in & adoption: Making it Easy & Beneficial
 “Why wouldn’t you?”
 Guidance on narrative, tone of voice and approach
rather than “Brand Book”
 The Open Source model: sharing key assets
 Finding, encouraging, supporting early adopters
 Sharing success: Relentless Forward Progress
The ultimate solution: A Work in Progress
Test Learn Refine Model
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012

19. Thank you
“Can we achieve our ambitions if we stay the same?”
Mission Critical: Crafting Your Communications Strategy Workshop 30 May 2012