Communicating for change

There’s nothing like a near death experience to get you thinking. When I emerged from a coma in February last year one of my very first thoughts was whether we were letting down any of our partners. Being the sort of partners they are, they soon told me to shut up, stop worrying and get better. I took their advice and just recently received the “all clear” after a year in which – with the help of my incredible family and wonderful friends – I dodged death a score of times.

My long illness allowed me to do a huge amount of thinking about what we are doing and why we are doing it: all of us at Well Made Strategy could make more money and work less hard if we did something else. But we wouldn’t be as happy and fulfilled. We have just had the chance to re-examine what we’re doing and to make ambitious plans for the future. The result is the handbook we are launching today and an excellent new strategy for ourselves.

On strategy we will:

• Work with organisations all over Africa who are promoting social change. Business or non-profit, it doesn’t matter but if they aren’t actively trying to do good, “other companies are available”.
• Attract the very best people
• Train up young people to be the very best providers of communications skills this continent – or any continent – offers. If they then get tempted elsewhere, so be it, but they will go with their resumés shining: “Trained by Well Made Strategy”

To support the change we seek, we are launching a new handbook on Communications for Social Change. We hope it will allow people to start thinking about social change communications in a more strategic and focused way. Gacheri and Aisha both put a huge amount of work into this project and we’re proud of the result. It takes all the clever thinking of ourselves and of our friends and distils it into a simple to use handbook that is aimed at the people we work with every day.

The handbook has been tested with a handful of organisations and now it’s your turn. We are excited to hear your experiences of using it on our Facebook page. If it makes us redundant so be it, but we’re pretty sure it won’t induce a coma!