How keep a vibrant online presence for your organization during COVID-19 lockdown

The biggest hurdle most organisations face to achieving a vibrant online presence is lack of enough quality engaging content to share across their digital platforms. Although many have the statistics to show the impact that their work is having, having a consistent and sustainable flow of success stories from where the implementation action happens to their communications teams/officers is a big challenge.

A visit to different digital platforms for many organizations shows that many suffer from a Content Deficiency Syndrome (CDS). Notable among the signs for CDS are large time gaps between updates shared and repeated use of particular content.

If your organisation has staff (some in 10s and 100s) working every day to achieve your organisation’s set objectives, why are stories about the impact that your work is having so hard to come by? If you seek to solve such a challenge, let me prescribe three practical things you can do to cure your organisation of the CDS and achieve a sustainable vibrant presence across all your digital/communications platforms.

1. Organisation's leadership must value and invest in communications

John C. Maxwell said that “everything rises and falls with leadership.” And this makes sense because every organisation’s priorities are set by its leadership. Areas of great interest to the leadership in any organisation always thrive while the others just get by. Therefore, as of first importance, to achieve effective communications, the leadership of your organisation needs to appreciate the vital and central role that communications plays.

I know that sometimes leaders are not able to invest as much in communications because their hands are tied by limited funds or specific contract clauses. However, leaders of organisations must, right from the project/programme inception stage, prioritise communications and lobby to have it as a core department in the organization with sufficient funding.

There is very little that any organisation can achieve without internal and external communications. For example, if you are a for-profit organization, you need to communicate to your target market about your products and why people should buy them. Communication. If you are a not-for-profit organisation, you need to communicate to your funders and tell them why they should invest in your work as you also communicate to your target community why they need to embrace what you are offering as solutions to their problem(s). Communication.

Meanwhile, for profit or not, all organisations have staff that need to be reminded continuously of the organisation’s mission and objectives while also being updated on what is happening in the organization through staff bulletins, noticeboard memos, newsletters,

An organsiation that values, prioritises, and invests in having effective communications will enjoy the following benefits:

        i. Great team work because through communications, all stakeholders—staff, partners, donors, target community members, etc.—will be mobilised and galvanised to each make their contribution to the shared mission as they all get updates on what needs to be done, who needs to do what, what has been done and achieved thus far, while those worthy of appreciation are appreciated and recognised for their work.

       ii. Sustained work and achievements beyond any project’s time frame and funding because the people will have an appreciation of the importance of the work that was done and will want to consolidate any achievements realised during the project’s implementation time frame.

Communications is not an add-on function. It is a role critical for the efficient operation of any organisation and its survival.

A mother who uses a donated mosquito net for sieving juice instead of using it to shield her children from mosquito bites is a mother who never quite appreciated the need for that mosquito in the first place. But through communications, that mother can be helped to appreciate the grave cost that malaria carries for her and her children and why a mosquito net needs to be used for its intended purpose only. And if effectively done, the mosquito net will indeed serve its purpose for a long time.

The critical role that communications plays makes it worthy of classification as a senior management role, and those who treat it as such will reap the rewards.

2. Profile impact, not activities or expenditure

If it is not leadership, the other reason why organisations struggle to find content for their digital platforms is that their communications are often focused on activities done and/or proof of expenditure and not impact achieved.

Updates on a workshop held (in a posh hotel), a project launched, donation of equipment, a graduation ceremony for trainees, a building commissioned, etc. are what fill the timelines of most organisations’ social media platforms and websites.

Although it is impossible to achieve impact without activities and expenditure (and hence the need to once in a while highlight the duo), these are often on-offs with very limited capacity to reveal the impact achieved through the activities carried out and money spent.

To highlight impact, content needs to move from profiling what has been done to what experiences the activity/expenditure has delivered to the different stakeholders. To achieve this, gathering stories of impact through interviews should be the focus and not covering events. This will generate a lot more content for use in your communications in addition to achieving for your organisation a deeper connection with your online audiences because people relate and connect more to stories/experiences as opposed to updates about facts.

If, for example, you have an event to commission a classroom block that your organisation has constructed for a given community, you will find that the presence of that classroom block carries varying significance depending on who you talk to. The students, the teachers, the head teacher, the parents, the community leaders, the local council officials, the Ministry of Education officials, your organisation’s staff, the builders who constructed it, etc. will each have a different story to share about what that building means to them hence giving you an abundance of stories (content) from just one event. And if you establish a good relationship with the community members, they will always be happy to tell you story after story of how that classroom block has benefited them and you can continue to milk that one project for stories for years to come as users of the classroom block change or evolve.

If your organization focuses on highlighting impact and not activities or expenditure, you will never run out of content for your digital platforms.

Sharing stories of how lives are being changed because of your work will also open more doors for partnerships and funding for your organisation because people will see the good work you are doing and great impact it is achieving.

3. Use an Impact Report Form*

                    i.  An Impact Report Form will achieve three things for your organisation:

                   ii. All staff will be creating communications content.

                 iii.  You will never lack what to share on your digital platforms because you will always have leads to where to get the next impact/success story from.

Staff will be made more aware of the impact their work is having and hence find their work more fulfilling.

An Impact Report Form (IRF) is only a summary of what impact any intervention has had on an individual. (It is important that you keep the focus on an individual because personal experiences provide more captivating stories.)

The IRF captures, briefly, what situation necessitated your organisation’s intervention, what intervention your organization implemented and what has changed in the life of the impacted person as a result of the intervention.

Of course, not all IRFs will produce success stories that will be featured on your digital platforms but they will provide your communications team with a pool of leads to great success stories and after vetting the IRFs, the communications team can always select a story to profile in detail using photography, videography and/or interviews.

A story is told of a sweeper at a NASA space center who was asked what their work at the center was and they responded, “I am sending a man to the moon.” Filling out IRFs will help all your staff (including you) know that as an organization you are all about achieving the desired end goal and staff will be able to see how their work is contributing to that as they report about the impact their work is having on your target community.

 A director who seldom leaves the head office but attends countless meetings to make decisions about the organsiation’s operations in the field should be able to report on how those meetings are facilitating the different interventions and what impact those interventions are achieving.

The same goes for support staff like drivers, cooks, etc. and full time office staff like human resource managers, accountants, etc.; all these should be able to connect their effort to the impact that the organisation is achieving because that impact is what your organization needs to be reporting about with everything else as a means to that end.

If your organisation's mission is to keep children safe and an accountant processes money for the purchase of airtime for staff and a member of staff makes an official phone call that saves a child from being abused, that accountant should be able to report about that because it is because they processed the airtime that the field staff was able to make that phone call that saved the child.

Sometimes, staff struggle achieving harmonious teamwork within organisations because some staff do not see how their work directly affects the organisation’s daily (and overall) ability to achieve or fail to achieve its desired impact. The IRF helps all staff weigh the impact of their toil on the organisation’s ability to achieve impact.

IRFs will also help you as an organization easily spot which staff deserve to be recognized as they each report on what contribution they made to any achieved impact.

Maybe more tasks or paperwork is the last thing you want to create for your staff, but the IRF (which can be in A5 size) is a form you and your staff should be excited about. For any organisation out to achieve impact, tracking how much impact you are achieving should be your obsession because stories of impact are what you need to be sharing with the world to show value for your effort and any funding received.

 A mandatory weekly filling in of the IRF by all staff should be doable for any organization.

*You are free to customize it to suit your organisation’s needs