CommsConsult had an opportunity to work with new creative multimedia partners in the spring of 2021. Approached by regular clients, Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the brief was delightfully wide and open: find ways to showcase the progress being made by their flagship KIX programme.
KIX – the Knowledge and Information Exchange – is part of the Global Partnership for Education initiative (GPE). Working with more than 80 partner countries, GPE is the ‘big kid in the education playground’ that has mobilised around US$11 billion to pursue its mission of equal education for children everywhere. During covid19, the mission became both more urgent and ambitious. As part of GPE, KIX supports the scaling of promising education innovations and strengthens partners’ capacity to address these challenges and CommsConsult’s brief was to help communicate both achievements and lessons learned along the way; finding the human interest story using first hand testimonials. It’s what we do best!
Using a mix of documentary reviews and interviews with KIX members, we identified and pitched a shortlist of stories we felt ‘needed telling’. From these, the client selected ten and gave us the ‘green light’ to start work. The CommsConsult team began the journalistic process of finding the human stories and experimenting with formats to communicate them clearly and compellingly.
Our print experts wrote a series of stories showcasing the variety of KIX projects including a one-stop resource for African education policymakers; innovative research on why some schools perform better than others and novel ways of upscaling teacher training in Latin America. The blogs were published on the KIX website in sequence over the summer to feed into the Global Education Summit in 2021.
Our clients gave us the chance to play with different communication formats and to produce multilingual content. With the help of our talented international consultants we produced a piece on gender equality, equity and inclusion during covid19 in English, French and Spanish and an infographic showing the KIX journey. A collection of videos brought together voices of the members to give testimony to the ways in which KIX has helped them learn, grow and act as a community to advance educational opportunities and outcomes in their countries.
Tiffany Barnes-Huggins, Program Officer for KIX said about us: “Through our collaboration with Comms Consult we have been able to draw out exciting stories, narratives and testimonials from the KIX Regional Hubs and several of the KIX Projects. We look forward to continue sharing more stories as they develop with the international education community and positioning KIX evidence for uptake by key decision makers!”
Over the years we have been happy to provide communication advice, training and support to a wide range of IDRC programmes including Knowledge for Development Myanmar; the innovative livestock research programme; and the Think Tank Initiative Policy Engagement and Communication project. We were happy to be invited back for more collaboration!