The Communication Initiative
THE COMMUNICATION INITIATIVE
WHY THE CI?
Major development challenges remain - including to achieve the MDGs, reduce poverty, address climate change, improve sexual and reproductive health, advance women's rights, improve child health, etc
The digital technologies provide a major opportunity for a globalised approach, relevant to local contexts to improve the action related to these issues
WHAT MORE IS NEEDED?
In order to make progress on these issues there needs to a much greater emphasis on seeking to:
- enhance positive social norms;
- increase policy debate;
- engage with cultural dynamics;
- have countries, people and communities driving their own development;
- raise support for the voices and perspectives of those most affected;
- make more extensive use of evaluation and research data
- address and change negative behaviours; and
- obtain higher levels of informed public debate on the key issues
HOW can these CHANGES BE ACHIEVED?
Crucial to achieving these factors which will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of all development action on these challenges are COMMUNICATION and MEDIA DEVELOPMENT strategies including: - Social Change Communication - Media Development - Social Networks - Public Engagement - Entertainment - Education - Behaviour Change Communication - Policy Advocacy - Information Communication Technology for Development - Freedom of Expression - Social Movement Communication - Journalists Rights and Safety - Partnership building - Knowledge sharing - Critical peer review and commentary - Media Relations - Community Action - Social Mobilisation - Community Organisation
These and other communication and media strategies working through digital technologies, mobile/cell, radio, interpersonal, television, print, local cultural and other media provide the basis for more effective and efficient development action.
HOW DOES THE CI MOVE THIS FORWARD? Role The Communication Initiative is the online community, social network, and knowledge sharing space developed by the group of Partner agencies for those people and organisations working on major development issues such as: HIV/AIDS, Natural Resource Management, Poverty, Children, Rights, Democracy and Governance, and Polio with a particular interest in communication and media initiatives and strategies such as Radio, Media Development, Entertainment, and Digital Technologies. Purpose The CI supports people in this community to - share, learn from and debate each other's programme experiences, strategic thinking, evaluation and research results; - identify relevant support for their work through materials, training, events, awards, funding opportunities, jobs and consultancy support; and - to consider, review, and debate relevant strategic and policy issues through contributing and commenting on policy blogs, voting and commenting on polls (see right column), and reviewing the change theory and planning base that underpin and guide their actions. These processes are essential for improved programmatic action, national and local decision making processes, and the development of improved, supportive policies at the international level The Platform The Key components of this platform include: Network - 75,000 plus Shared, Summarised Knowledge - 35,000 plus E-magasines - eg The Drum Beat - 47,000 subscribed Knowledge portal - 5 million plus page views Review and Critique - 60,000 plus ratings/comments Peer Relationships - 200,000 more than twice to a contact Debate - Polls and Forums Classifieds Calendar Blogs COMING SOON International Development News Portal eg Full Social Network for Int'l Development
Nearly finished - feel free to look around but please do not share - thanks
Research and Evaluation Across all of these issues there is a significant, priority emphasis on research and evaluation - from impact data to methodologies - the network includes 5,000 in academic institutions NOTE: This is an area on which we would welcome advice - how to utilise this platform to advance the research and evaluation agenca across development action [eg research communication ideas] We organise both by each individual issue - eg HIV/AIDS, Democracy and Governance, Gender - but importantly also both drawing relationships between the issues to refect the reality - eg Gender and HIV - and ensuring people and organisations involved in each "sector" are exposed to work, thinking and network members in other sectors
There are specific, major initiatives for Africa and Latin America [in Spanish] - these are run and managed from Johannesburg and Bogota. ENGAGEMENT Network - There are over 75,000 people from thousands of development organisations ranging from small, local NGOs in economically poor communities to global decision makers in large international agencies who have joined and participate in this network - this grows at 15 per day, on average - 65% are in [so called] developing countries - 70% are communicators/media - 30% are policy makers, funders, technical experrts in other areas - across the full spectrum of local,national and international development issues The media and communication people engaged cover the spectrum of action across this community including: - Journalism - Editing - Script writing - Producing - Theatre - Music - Advocacy - Digital Technology developers - Research - Advertising - Community activism - Traditional cultural communication - Media relations - etc Site Use - Over the past 12 months [September 08 to August 09] there have been 3,000,000 individual user sessions with multiple page views per session on the portal - Google Urchin stats - 70% of site use is from developing countries The network has contributed over 35,000 knowledge summaries. In the past 12 months, users accessed the links to the original and substantive knowledge 300,000 plus times. IMPACT - Network Survey [2,335 respondents] 86 % had used The CI to improve their work - 45% of the ratings that users completed on knowledge summaries in response to the question "How useful did you find the knowledge and contacts on this page to your work?" were a 5 for "Awesome" [other options are Poor, OK, Good, Great]. There are over 60,000 votes registered within these ratings thus far. One further metric we use to assess added value to development action is how often people using the CI process contact others in the network for support, help, advice and knowledge. In a recent network survey, 33% of the sample group had contacted someone else in the network. That would equate to 13, 359 people over the past year. And 61% had contacted people 2 to 10 times - so somewhere in the range of 26,000 to 130,000 contacts for the purpose of network members improving their work. This is in addition to those just utilising the knowledge and interaction in the e-magasines such as Son de Tambora and on the site at www.comminit.com/la DECISION MAKING The process is run by a set of Partners who: - Come together to debate their perspectives on major development issues and challenges; - Take the major strategic decisions in order to implement the above principles into action - Develop working relationships to pursue their common objectives related to changing development policies and improving the revenue base for this work ****************** Present Features- examples Just a few feature examples include: 1. Peer Comments: Ratings, Comments and Averages 2. Top 10s - by Rating and by Access 3. Extensive taxonomoy - allows filtering 4. Theming - different designs for different knowledge 10. Network member control and access 11. Complete work flow and permissions control - example access control 12. Hundreds of modules and other items of functionality 14. Video 15. USERS and USER ROLES and PROFILES 16. POLICY BLOGS
49% had initiated an exchange and dialogue with peers prompted by a CI ‘item’
88% of that group regarded the exchange as positive for their work;
61% of the overall sample rated the CI as a 7 or better on a 10 point scale with 1 being ‘of no value and 10 being “extremely valuable”…
…with 84% rating The CI a 5 or better on that scale
- In the past 12 months, on over 400,000 occasions users have accessed the external links associated with each knowledge summary - this is the in-depth source knowledge - you have to be very interested and engaged to go that deep in The CI process.
- All trends are up - 35% growth in site use when comparing the two most recent 12 month periods; 6,000 plus new network members over past 12 months; subscribers outmatch unsubscribers by a 25 to 1 margin; an overflow of knowledge from the network to be shared causing a considerable back-log of content.