PE-DEV Toolkit / Trousse à outils de MP-DEV/part1/Basic Guidelines

NOTE: PDF GUIDELINES FOR EACH SECTION TO COME

1- Planning stage: how to prepare and plan your initiates

Well-planned and executed events, activities or engagement campaigns is a good way to interest Canadians in international development issues and humanitarian aid.

Take the time to plan carefully—some of the most important considerations are:

• Know your target audience. Based on that information, identify relevant objectives and what strategic and consistent messages will have meaning and importance for them.
• Plan for what level(s) of the continuum you are targeting.
  • Do you aim to raise awareness, deepen understand or encourage concrete actions?
  • Are you focusing on a level or levels likely to appeal to your audience?
  • Canadians can learn about and support Canada’s efforts to reduce poverty without becoming actively involved. Other Canadians may be ready to go a step further by commenting on or sharing a food security blog post, attending a conference on sustainable development goals, or volunteering to work for an organization.
• Research peer organizations involved in international development and humanitarian aid. Are there opportunities to work together and maximize the reach of public engagement activities?
• Consider using virtual alternatives to your activities and initiatives, especially to reach new audiences. Also consider promoting your events and initiatives on online platforms.
• Think about what success looks like for your activity(ies) and how will you know when you have achieved it. Planning good qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods is important to ensure that you are meeting your objectives and managing your budget efficiently. Once your activity if over, take the time to reflect on successes and areas for improvement. Note lessons learned that may guide you in the future.

2- Best practices to consider

Take a look at this non-extensive list of tips and best practices to consider when planning engagement initiatives.

Use third parties to expand reach

•Use trusted individuals that are trusted by diverse Canadians and can become “multipliers”. They can be champions, social media influencers, VIPs, teachers, student leaders, etc. They can help overcome barriers through implied third-party endorsement.

•Employ partnerships that can be multi-sectoral (i.e. with other sectors, different Federal Departments or levels of government, or with educational and cultural institutions).

Note: The principle of “Each one teaches one” builds on the principle that it is everyone’s duty to teach someone else.

Reach beyond the “usual suspects”

•Raise awareness and increasing knowledge with those who are not yet or poorly aware by reaching beyond the already existing networks of global citizens within the international assistance community.

•Diversify reach to include Indigenous peoples and other minority communities.

•Reducing barriers to participation will increase diversity and numbers of participants. These include financial, geographic, cultural, physical (accessibility), language barriers.

•Engagement  strategies cannot use generic cookie-cutter approaches when trying to reach different demographics.

Employ digital tools

·Use tools such as social media channels, virtual meeting technologies, webcasting, podcasting that help overcome barriers to participation such as geographic, financial, availability.

·In addition, consider digital gamification. Applying a gaming approach to facilitate learning has demonstrated its effectiveness with youth audiences.

Connect local issues to global issues

•Leverage Canadians’ view of global responsibility and humanity.

•Use examples from challenges affecting both domestic and global communities (such as the Covid-19 pandemic) to demonstrate how global issues have an impact at the local level (safety, wellbeing).

Note: Fostering emotions rooted in notions of shared responsibility and global citizenship can be a strategy to consider.

Foster peer recognition

•Participation will be greater if learners are recognized by their peers and their achievements validated.

•Engagement initiatives need to be designed and promoted so that its value to learners (and potential recognition by peers) are obvious.

Evaluate outcomes

·Using support from College and University programs as well as alumni networks are ways of garnering visibility and follow engagement results.

·At the moment, the government of Canada is using the following ultimate outcome for engagement initiatives: “Canadians are expected to take action in their own ways and as a result, become global citizens”.

Note: For more on this topic, check the section “Evaluation and measurement”.

3- Types of engagement initiatives: examples and tips

IMAGES WITH CONTINUUM LEVEL TO COME

Organizing in-person and online events

Examples: seminars, conferences, webinars, study tours, photo or art exhibit, film screening

Tips:

•Plan an event with clear objectives.

•Focus on specific audiences instead of ‘’Canadians at large’’ and develop specific engagement strategies for each audience.

•Before planning an event, evaluate what has been done or planned by partners for the same target groups (NGOs working within the same communities, including non-traditional groups).

•When possible, work in partnership with other likeminded and complementary organizations to maximize reach, share best practices and build capacity.

•Include clear and consistent key messages as part of the events, to communicate long-term results and effectiveness (going beyond isolated events and facts).

•Present the same event in various locations, when possible.

•If you are holding a series of events in a number of cities, develop a plan to engage with local organizations and media, when possible. Evaluate the possibility of including large cities and small communities, including rural and northern locations.

•Have an evaluation plan for all events/products, including both quantitative and qualitative indicators, to assess behaviour changes.

•If you are planning an event with a southern speaker, reach out to other Canadian partners. They might be interested in inviting this guest to speak at their own event.

Engaging and involving the Canadian education sector

Examples: Development of curriculum content with teachers, training sessions for Canadian teachers, partnerships with local education institutions, etc.

Tips:

•Consult with teachers and get their feedback on curriculums;

•Help teachers distributing the material;

•Engage education faculties to target students studying to become teachers;

•Get in touch with the Inter-Council Network, which has strong ties with different local school boards across the country.

Sharing personal stories of experiences abroad

Example: blog, news article, podcast or video about an intern or a volunteer who undertook an international experience with your organization

Tips:

•Interns and volunteers should prepare an engagement plan to implement before, during and after they go abroad, as well as a short report upon their return to Canada.

•During their stay abroad, ask them to write a blog post, tweet, share photos or use the social media platform of their choice to share their experience with other Canadians.

•Suggest that they contact newspapers and TV and radio stations in their communities; a journalist might be interested in featuring a story about their experience abroad.

•Create links to intern or volunteer blogs on your organization’s Web site.

•Develop a speaker’s bureau to have interns and volunteers participate and share with others when they return to Canada.

•Develop joint public engagement campaigns with other Canadian, international or multilateral partner organizations (e.g., international days, UN SDGs).

Developing a social media campaign

Tips:

•Before developing a social media campaign, evaluate the possibility of working in partnership with other organizations

(likeminded and complementary) to extend reach, build capacity, share knowledge, harmonize messages and eliminate duplication.

•Plan public engagement campaigns (using traditional and new media) to promote Canadians who have worked in developing countries to make a difference.

•Think about partnering with a ‘social media champion’ or ‘influencer’.

•Measure the reach by counting the exact number of people that a social media post could reach. Note that the number of impressions (potential views) of a social media post does not represent a significant result.

•Calculate the number of actions resulting from the publication of messages in social media, e.g., number of retweets, likes, shares (quantitative evaluation).

Evaluate the content of comments published on social media (qualitative evaluation).   

Producing and disseminating communication products

Examples: Videos, films, photos, podcasts, paper and electronic publications (pamphlets, books, etc.);

pre-paid media articles; Web sites or interactive platforms; TV, radio and newspaper ads directly linking to the engagement project funded by GAC.

Tips:

•Define objectives and confirm target audiences. Develop a rationale to justify the choice of medium for those audiences.

•Establish a distribution strategy before developing communication products (confirm target audience, distribution list, timelines, responsibilities, etc.).

•Before developing a new communication product, check if another partner has already developed a similar tool.

•Prepare an evaluation plan for all products, including both quantitative and qualitative indicators wherever possible