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It’s been an unbelievably busy year here at CommsConsult and on December 14^th the team invited local friends, businesses, clients and colleagues to a local art gallery in Falmouth to give our thanks for their support and hard work throughout the last 12 months.

Mince pies, wine and festive cheer was enjoyed by all.  Thanks to local duo Kola for providing music for the evening.

I love workshops that begin with people telling me that they don’t really have the time to be there, and finish with them asking me to ‘make it longer next time please’. 

I’m on my way home from New Delhi, where I was running another two-day Research Communications workshop, this time for researchers involved in one of the Global Development Network’s global research projects looking at Public Expenditure Monitoring (PEM).

CommsConsult is, happily, a regular provider of training workshops for GDN’s network of southern researchers, having delivered Policy Influence training for AERC researchers on Africa-China trade, and Presentational training workshops for its Awards and Medals finalists before the annual conference.

 Last week, I was dismayed as I went through the headlines in our daily press. Particularly distressing was a story in the NewsDay of November 10, which reported that according to a report by Plan International, sixty-seven percent of Zimbabwean girls were failing to progress to secondary school. This was as a result of many factors among them – poverty, sexual abuse and cultural practices.

The government is clearly failing girls.

When developing online research resource portals, databases and community groups it is often difficult to assess how people will be using a platform as it grows. As online resources for research in international development are often put together without a commercial business framework in mind, there is a potential that the functioning fluidity of the site may not be addressed at a basic level before it is launched.

Audiences for development research websites are often very diverse, with users seeking information from academic, aid worker, policy-maker, NGO and non-professional backgrounds. This rich range of users can be problematic when defining the way a site functions and communicates the information it has available.

Here at CommsConsult, we’re game to take on most challenges…For the second year in a row, we were asked to run a Simulation Exercise for keen first-year journalism students at our local University*.

The purpose of the exercise is to introduce rookie journalists to the cut-and-thrust of a Press Conference, and to encourage them to unearth the story behind the official statements, and to interrogate the dark and dodgy corners that often lurk behind a story.

Our team, of course, was there to provide substance to the dark and dodgy corners….

At CommsConsult, we have found that creating short film trailers can be an effective and relatively low-cost way of spreading the word about the events that we cover. 

A two-minute trailer can sum up the themes and issues being addressed during a conference or workshop quickly and succinctly whilst being visually interesting and compelling. They are also the perfect opportunity to provide your audience with practical information, such as dates and locations, as well as emphasising your organisation’s logo or brand.

However, there are a number of things to consider when putting together a trailer...

The CommsConsult team travelled to Bogota, Colombia, recently for the Global Development Network’s 12^th Annual Conference. This year’s Conference centered on the theme of “Financing Development for a Post-Crisis World: The Need for a Fresh Look”. GDN is a great client – they’re always on the lookout for new ways of communicating the great work that southern academics are doing – with their help. We were invited back, for the second year, to run the GDNet Online Outreach Team, doing social reporting on all of the hot-off-the-press conference news.

Facilitating workshops can be both exhausting and challenging. It’s often difficult to keep participants engaged and energised as an individual or as part of a small team. On the flip side, participants can often find it frustrating if a meeting or workshop goes in a direction which is simply not relevant to them.

My tip for facilitators would be to take a step back and let the participants do the hard work. This is often more enjoyable for those involved, and is potentially far more rewarding in terms of the ideas that are shared and the consensus formed.

We are all familiar with the idea of participatory workshops, but there is one participatory approach that takes this ‘mantra’ one step further – ‘open space’.

There are multiple audiences and nodal points in which knowledge must travel to reach its end game, but these points are often not covered in an interconnected way. This is one of the key messages I have take from the AgKnowledge Africa event currently taking place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Knowledge sharing theories often talk about the need for intercultural communication, but in practice we often follow a different path.

Let’s be honest, effective knowledge sharing can be difficult, with lots of different factors to consider. We need to firstly make knowledge understandable, to make sense of what it is telling us in our native languages. Then we have to think about how we can pass knowledge on to other people within different cultures and societies and through their languages. If this is not complicated enough we also have to think about the resources we hold, the tools at our disposal and the relationships we have formed to help make knowledge travel.

The barriers created by language to knowledge sharing was one of the first issues that found prominence at the AgKnowledge Africa event, currently taking place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This got me thinking about one particular question ‘What percentage of research on development issues is translated into other languages?’ My own conclusion was brief – very little.

I was pleased to here from Dr Emmanuel Chabata, based at the University of Zimbabwe, about his work which seeks to build capacity in this area and help domesticate knowledge through its translation into local languages.