Organisations working to create social impact, from non-profit organisations (NGO’s) and foundations to government institutions, development agencies and businesses, communicate about issues that are difficult to explain because they rarely have a single cause or a simple solution.
For example, poverty is connected to how work, income and public services are distributed. Gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) is influenced by beliefs about gender and power, as well as the institutions people rely on for protection and justice. Climate change is experienced through preparedness and adaptation linked to living conditions. The complexity of these issues can make them difficult to communicate clearly because they are layered, people experience them differently and people disagree about what causes them and on what change should look like.
A social-impact communication strategy therefore requires more than deciding what an organisation wants to say. It needs to consider how communication can contribute towards the change the organisation is pursuing and how people affected by an issue can affect the communication itself.
Social impact refers to the effect that a programme, policy or any other form of intervention has on people and communities. A communication strategy is the set of choices that determines how communication will contribute towards a wider objective. It decides what communication needs to do, who needs to be involved and what should receive attention.
How can communication contribute to social change?
A social-impact communication strategy should begin with the change the organisation is trying to contribute towards.
An organisation trying to improve access to a service has a different communication problem from one trying to influence public policy. The first may need to understand why people are unable or unwilling to use the service. The second may need to influence how decision-makers understand an issue. In some cases, people may need information. In others, the problem may be trust, access or the response of an institution.
Research the issue, not only the audience
Audience research often asks who people are, where they live and which platforms they use. Social-impact communication requires a deeper form of inquiry.
People encounter an issue with existing experiences and interpretations. They may distrust the institution communicating with them. They may understand the problem differently from the organisation. They may also know something about the issue that the organisation does not.
When organisations work on complex social issues, their understanding of the problem may differ from how people experience it in their own lives. Social listening involves paying attention to and analysing what people are saying about an issue, and it can reveal the questions people are asking, the language they use and the parts of an issue that an organisation may have overlooked.
Research can therefore do more than inform how a message is communicated. It can reveal where an organisation’s own assumptions are incomplete or do not reflect people’s lived experiences.
Decide who has influence
Participation means that people have opportunities to contribute to decisions that affect them. In communication, this raises a question about who gets to influence the story?
Inviting people to appear in a campaign is not necessarily participation. Their experiences may still be selected and interpreted according to the organisation’s priorities. A social-impact communication strategy should therefore identify where people can influence communication itself. This may include how an issue is described, which questions are asked and what knowledge is considered important.
Build the organisation’s ability to listen
Communication needs to be part of how the organisation learns. Programme staff notice recurring concerns. Community partners hear questions. Monitoring teams identify patterns across the work. A strategy should create ways for this knowledge to move through the organisation. This could mean creating systems for recording observations or opportunities for feedback to inform future decisions.
The purpose is not simply to gather more information. It is to make sure that what an organisation hears can become part of what it knows. A strategy should create a route for these insights to travel back into the work.
Measure the contribution of communication
The purpose defined at the beginning of the strategy should determine what is measured. If communication was intended to help people find a service, reach alone cannot show whether this happened. An organisation would need to know whether people understood where to go and whether the information helped them take the next step.
If the purpose was to contribute to a change in how a subject is understood, evaluation should explore whether people interpreted it differently and what role the communication may have played. This makes measurement more useful because it asks whether communication contributed to the purpose it was given.
It can also reveal something the organisation did not anticipate, such as new questions, misunderstandings or responses that suggest the strategy needs to change. Evaluation then becomes part of the organisation’s learning, rather than something that happens only after the communication strategy has been implemented.
A social impact communication strategy is a living resource; designed to evolve as the dynamics of the social landscape evolve. Organisations that grasp this concept will leverage communication as an enabling force, moving past the goal of basic visibility.