It is rarely one can say “I had the pleasure of being locked up in a room for a week”

But I felt lucky, and fortunate to be locked up with my brethren in crime, five CWPF staff. It was self-inflicted, though. After working on social media with the Challenge Program staff for the last IFWF forum, it seemed that my anarchistic behaviour put seeds of doubt in the mind of Michael, the Program’s Communication Coordinator.

“Seeds of doubt” on whether it was time to re-think how to fully integrate their online and social media strategy within an overall communication strategy…. So we decided to lock ourselves up, vowing not to come out of the room until we went through a process of re-evaluating our outreach strategy.

For a week, we ploughed through basic questions like “What are the key messages we want to bring” and “How do we bring those messages to our target audience” down to the practicalities of concrete workplans.

Reflecting on the workshop, I came up with some observations.

Doubts are a sign of strength, not of weakness.

Few organisations are strong enough to openly debate and question their approaches or strategies. I was very pleasantly surprised CPWF worked within an environment in which it was “OK to question”. It was OK to re-evaluate the team’s communications strategy, and put some fundamental questions open on the table.

A communications strategy is a reflection of a “deeper sense”. This came out already at the start of the workshop, with the question “What are the three key messages you want to bring out”. You can’t discuss that, without discussing the basic values of an organisation: “What is our added value to humanity”, “Where do we differ from others”, “What are our key deliverables”. These are not easy questions, but CPWF is clearly strong enough to tackle these. Kudos!

An effective outreach is more than just “making noise”

Everyone engages in social media these days. It is easy to prove some kind of deliverable to justify the efforts: the amount of Twitter followers or Facebook “Likes” going up, the amount of visitors on your website.

However, few organisations structurally integrate their social media strategy within an online strategy, which in its turn, fits into a media strategy. Few have the courage to look at “why” they want to engage into social media, and “how”. Once again, I was pleasantly surprised about the effort and energy the people in the workshop showed while building up their online strategy from key messages down to (or “up to”) workplans.

It is a fact, though, that targeted online media outreach, requires efforts. Efforts are needed, not only to design the strategy, and “set things up”, but much more so for recurring tasks to engage with your audience, to expand your online networks, explore new possibilities.

On the positive side: it is only with targeted online media outreach, that we will have an impact. If I go onto my balcony in Rome with a megaphone and start talking about the demands for hydropower and fishing in the Mekong, 200 people might stop and listen to my Flemish raving. I would have reached 200 people, but impacted none. It is not “reach” which is important, it is “impact”….

“Measuring impact”: easier said than done

What is “impact” for a research program like CPWF? How does one measure that? Would it be the amount of policies, changed or adopted through our work? The amount of stakeholders we can bring together to discuss the multi use of water as a common resource?

By itself, this is difficult to define and measure. But when we look at the effectiveness of an online strategy, it is even more difficult. Certainly if we look at “cause” and “effect”: if we can see an impact of our work, how is it directly related to our media outreach, to our online presence?

The most practical of ways to measure impact is, as we did in the workshop, to define the key messages we want to bring, the key content we want people to read, and to define the key audience. We then define metrics measuring how our key audience reads our key content.  These metrics can be defined for each online media tool.

Websites are like Rubik’s Cubes

Part of the workshop was to review the design and usability of the new CPWF website.

Discussing the design of a website always reminds me of puzzling with a Rubik’s cube: The Rubik’s cube which will always be a larger cube made of 3x3x3 smaller coloured cubes. A larger cube made of smaller cubes.

No matter how you design your website, the end result will still be … a website, the cube. And the smallest unit of information will always be a post or a page, like the smaller coloured cubes in a Rubik’s cube.

But by jolly, you have 43 quintillion ways to rearrange the smaller cubes making the bigger Rubik’s cube look completely different.  A website’s design and navigation has no lesser possible combinations.

While there are some basic technical and usability rules, everyone still has an opinion on website navigation, colours and styling. Nobody is right, nobody is wrong, but ain’t it a drag to come to a design that most people might like?

It is important though, as I always claim “Show me your website, and I will tell you what organisation you are!”
Peter Casier,
Social Media and Online Presence Consultant
CGIAR Consortium Office

For more information on the meeting outcomes, contact: Ilse Pukinskis