Interim comms/engagement evaluation / 9
GHA Report 2012 -
interim comms/engagement evaluation
Introduction
The GHA programme has been described as the ‘gold standard’ in humanitarian financing reporting, and the annual flagship GHA Report represents the peak of the programme’s work each year. It provides the latest, most comprehensive picture of humanitarian financing, the key figures and trends. As such, the launch is imperative to ensuring as wide a reach as possible of the report. The Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) programme launched GHA Report 2012 on 19 July 2012.
Objectives
Through the launch and outreach process, the GHA programme, and the communications function within it, aimed to increase awareness and use of the GHA Report. Ultimately, we want to enable donor country officials to make better funding decisions, and for this reason it is important for us to reach not only donors themselves but also those in influencing roles, i.e. infomediaries, parliamentarians, the media etc.
This report is an immediate response to the launch (written one week later) and so deals largely with outputs, another report will be produced after six months which will enable us to better track outcomes.
Activities
Events
Press conference
Date, venue, DI staff: 19 July 2012, 11 a.m.; UN centre New York; Lydia, Lisa, Tom, Georgina.
Activity: Sponsored by the UK permanent mission to the UN, and promoted by the UN Press Centre, we had a panel at the front of an auditorium: Tom was the Chair and Lydia presented the findings of the report. Lisa sat on the panel. The event was recorded for UN press.
Audiences: media: UN and wider
Outcomes: Six journalists attended the event. Unfortunately, the event coincided exactly with announcements regarding Russia and China’s veto of a resolution on sanctions of Syria, which inevitably drew the focus of many journalists’ attention. However, following the press conference interviews were set up with Lydia (with the Inter Press News Agency: coverage here) and Dan Coppard (with Media Global News).
Stakeholder event
Date, venue, DI staff: 19 July 2012, 6 – 7.30 p.m.; UN centre New York; Lydia, Lisa, Tom, Georgina.
Activity: We hosted an evening side event. This had been promoted on the ECOSOC website; we also sent tailored invitations to approx 100 people. Thirty-four people attended – most seats were full. Tom was the Chair, Lydia presented the report findings, Lisa sat on the panel and Jakob Hallgren of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs followed on with his own reflections of the report providing a donor perspective. Questions from the floor followed.
Audiences: Government representatives, NGOs, UN staff
Outcomes: The report was very well received. Valerie Amos referred to the report in her closing comments for the humanitarian segment.
InterAction event
Date, venue, DI staff: 23 July 2012, 2-3.30 p.m.; InterAction office Washington DC; Lydia, Tom Georgina.
Activity: InterAction promoted the event for us. We gave a presentation to approx. 10 NGO representatives. Georgina was the Chair, Lydia presented the report findings. The smaller group setting enabled an active discussion, with several questions around, for example, the role of non-DAC donors, private donors, the role of resilience-building, the military and so on.
Audiences: US NGOs
Outcomes: Delegates were very interested in the idea of receiving GHA’s aid data training workshop in the autumn, so we will follow up with InterAction on this.
Potential future events
We are considering holding events to promote the GHA Report in GHA donor capital cities in the early autumn (budget-dependent). Lydia, Georgina, Tom, Laura will discuss.
Online activity & outreach
Activity
We placed content on the following DI websites:
GHA website:
· GHA Report 2012 downloadable and visible from the homepage
· GHA Report 2012 Summary downloadable
· GHA blog on the report’s findings from Lydia
· Guest blogs from Peter Walker (Feinstein International Center) and Ed Cairns (Oxfam GB)
DI website:
· GHA Report 2012 in the ‘samples of our work’ section of the site
aidinfo website:
· Blog from GHA about GHA Report 2012
Other:
· GHA Report 2012 on Issuu
· Infographics and images on DI Flickr
Outcomes:
· The GHA website received 3,372 visits during the week following this year’s launch (65% of which were from new visitors), compared with 3,651 during the week following the launch of GHA Report 2011 (when 60% were from new visitoris).
· During a ‘normal’ week (no launch etc.), the GHA website might receive, anything from 2,000-3,000 visits.
Social media:
· Twitter: The report, and subsequent pieces of coverage, were promoted on GHA, devinit, aidinfo, Lisa, Dan S, Cordelia, Izzi, and Mariella’s twitter accounts – from DI, and generated twitter activity.
· Facebook: The report and subsequent pieces of coverage were promoted on GHA Facebook
· LinkedIn: The report was promoted on LinkedIn, including the following groups: International Development, International Humanitarian and Development Professionals, International Humanitarian Studies Associsation, Humanitarian Communication, Aid transparency.
· Pinterest: our graphics and photos were used by others i.e. OECD.
· Visual.ly: LW uploaded the executive summary infographic.
Outcomes: Thirty-three tweets about the report have been picked up in the first week. Facebook post-views ranged from 60-130 per post. Promotion on LinkedIn reached a potential collective total of 26,251 people. There were 147 views on issuu.
Media/infomediary outreach & launch
Press release
The press release was written in-house with support from Portland Communications. Portland conducted the sell-in with a number of identified journalists (the list was signed off in-house) and distributed the release on the day of the launch at 11 a.m. US time (4 p.m. UK time) to coincide with the press conference in New York. They then followed up with journalists for us and updated us with the latest run-down of coverage received (see Annex 1 below) for the GHA Report.
Audience: Mainstream media and relevant infomediaries
Infomediaries & media
Activity: Georgina contacted a range of infomediaries in advance of the launch to tell them about the forthcoming report and ask them to promote it through their networks/on their websites/via social media etc. Portland included infomediaries in their outreach. Portland conducted a sell-in to 27 media outlets in advance of the launch date, and distributed the press release to a wide range of relevant international, print, broadcast and newswire media including over 700 journalists in the US and the UK and over 1,000 international journalists, the majority of whom are based in Africa. Portland then followed up with calls to an agreed list of 20 priority outlets, including news desks, correspondents and editors. They subsequently answered queries from journalists, and provided regular feedback to DI regarding progress and coverage.
Outcomes: Media requests - our media spokespeople were Lydia and Lisa in the US, and Dan C and Judith in the UK. Lydia gave four interviews (IRIN, Reuters AlertNet, and IPS out of which came articles, and South African broadcast company), Judith gave one (Guardian Global Development) and Dan C gave one on climate change (Media Global, article will be published in August) which was a result of the press conference.
Coverage - The latest count reveals that the GHA Report was covered by 27 outlets (some of which published more than once). See Annex 1 below for a list of online coverage recorded in the first week following the launch. Lydia also contributed a guest blog to ODI’s humanitarian practice network.
Messaging - Looking at the focus of the headlines of these articles:
· funding gap and unmet needs – four articles
· the need to build resilience – three articles
· humanitarian aid system struggling to adapt to changing face of crisis (our press release headline) – two articles
· specific focus on infographics – two articles
· larger, higher profile crises are prioritised at the expense of smaller ones – one article
The remainder focused upon ‘emerging trends’ in their headlines and often reproduced our press release copy in the body of the item.
Favourability – For the most part, the coverage received was very neutral in its approach to the report – articles generally reproduced and expanded upon key messages from the press release or interview. Two articles, however, did present inaccurate messaging: i) The Times of India, with the headline India should brace for shrinking global aid said: “The latest Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report released recently clearly indicates that the pool of global aid is shrinking”; i) The Church Times (‘the world’s leading Anglican newspaper’) used the headline “UN critical of aid system”.
Donor outreach
In addition to the large number of donors included on our hard copy or e-distribution lists, Georgina sent tailored emails to a number of donors (see column B) highlighting key points from and about the report and inviting further engagement with GHA. (We were wary of offering anything too specific given the current uncertainty around GHA resource/capacity.)
Report distribution
Online
We distributed our GHA Report launch announcement email to 1,092 people (via Campaign Monitor) on the day of the launch. The GHA e-newsletter was distributed on 31st July, headlining the GHA Report, going to 954 recipients, 20% of whom opened it (the industry average for opening a not-for-profit email is 14%).
Outcomes: The report launch announcement email was opened by 26% of recipients, 41% of whom clicked through the email link. The industry average for opening a not-for-profit email is 14%. The report was also posted on a number of infomediary websites (see pp 8-9 of the annex below), each of which will have a certain extent of reach.
Offline
Hard copy distribution with accompanying cover letter: sent to 1124 recipients so far. Lydia and Georgina consulted with all staff, and went through a considered process in finalising the distribution list. Follow up requests will be dealt with over the months ahead
Learnings
Messaging
Tom initiated discussions around messaging which the team was able to engage in once the report had gone to print, during the final week of June. Three weeks remained to discuss and agree on messaging, draft and finalise a press release and undergo media training before the launch. Given the amount of discussion and thought needed, and level of workload to fit in before the launch, ideally we would have started this process earlier. The practical reality was that LP, LW and GB had been fully occupied with the production process up to that print date (25th June), leaving little-to-no time to begin messaging discussions. However, it was felt that next time we need to clearly schedule in communications and messaging involvement earlier on in the process and ensure that we make time for it, in turn ensuring consistency across headline messages in our executive summary, foreword, and press release. That said, it was felt that the messaging discussions arrived early enough to influence the executive summary infographic and the stories for the photo captions, which was considered very useful.
Media outreach
Portland’s role in conducting the sell-in to key media, distributing the press release on the launch day, and then following up to secure coverage, was very successful and enormously beneficial for our outreach effort. Given the large amount of work needed to arrange the launch events, Georgina and Tom’s time available for outreach was limited in the couple of weeks prior to the launch, so the capacity and skills offered by Portland was very valuable. In this instance their support came without costs attached. In the future we would need to consider whether the benefits of having this consultancy support outweighed the costs it would accrue. (The value of Portland’s hours on this occasion was around £4,000. This figure was calculated by analysing the hours spent on the project. We should bear in mind that for the launch of the GHA Report 2012 Portland’s input to the press release was minimal and the pitching was restricted to a handful of media outlets. Before providing cost estimates for any future media activities, Portland would want to assess any projects on an
individual basis.) By way of comparison to the visibility received by this year’s report, last year’s can be seen here, when we had no additional support, and no Tom!
There were a couple of instances of inaccurate media coverage, as referred to above on page 4. We need to account for the time it takes to reply/address incorrect statements as part of our press strategy.
Capacity
While four of us were involved in launch events, Dan Sparks filled the vital role of distributing the report announcement email, setting live all web copy, uploading the data to the website, and all files to Flickr and Issuu. However, there are many more social media opportunities and outlets, such as ManyEyes, pinterest, Visual.ly etc. which we did not tap into this time. Dan was also the one GHA contact in the Wells office to field calls from the media. Without web support in-house, we relied upon Shane to assist us through the launch from the technical side (Oli was away). Shane designed the GHA Report landing page banner and nugget for the home page. On the day of the launch, Dan and Georgina were unable to set live the images accompanying blogs and reports due to a new glitch in the system. Shane was unavailable to deal with this until late that evening. He was also unable to create a ‘view online’ button for the report on Issuu (the feature that allows users to view the publication online in a nicer format than a PDF) around the launch time, so it was not until the following Monday (23rd) that Oli was able to pick this up on his return from leave. We need to be aware that our lack of in-house web support presents a risk when faced with time-sensitive requirements as seen in this instance.
Due to very limited GHA capacity, we did not have GHA staff available in the UK to act as media spokespeople. Fortunately, Judith and Dan C were available and willing to act in this capacity. We must be aware that the GHA capacity restraints present a risk in these circumstances.
Publication and production
Observations
· The proofreading was poor – we used David Wilson, who has done much of the proofreading for GHA and DI more broadly in recent years and who we have been happy with in the past.