Real talk, getting down communications basics where we have actually one our long time wiith website editor and a communications expert and assistant Pascal Corbé. You can see him here. I will highlight him and so that's Pascal. Thank you for joining. why are we doing this? we have been working together since over a year and we have really experienced that communication - if it's done well - has a very important place in communication and we really want to expose that knowledge and also coming from your passion that you really see communication can move something, can really achieve great results maybe more than other technical activities or training this is your passion which really drives you to reach people to motivate people to give them the right keys and tools. But not only the passion is why we invited pascal. we explicitly invited him because he has also a vast experience he was also a former colleague of us working in Bonn and Eschborn for the global donor platform but he has also vast experience in working for un namely unaids and unicef in johannesburg in southern africa. he also worked for the african union he lived in kenya and there's so much more i can tell you but this is not about me this is basically about pascal so welcome pascal to the floor um thank you for joining us today and let's get started hi there everyone and thanks joy for the kind introduction i would say we go straight at it the format of this webinar is called open office hours because it's primarily primarily for you to ask questions about communications so please make ample use of this opportunity especially after this brief kickoff that i'm going to give on the three themes of today we're going to have a look at some easy steps to make your articles more attractive to readers then we're looking at the usual structure of articles and finally we're going to touch on how we portray individuals in our stories so before we can look at the little tweaks that we can make on our content to make it more attractive to readers because that's what we want we want readers that's our primary goal we need to have a quick look at some strategy in other words at the broader picture and how you want to approach that so a fundamental concept is clearly that your aim is to convey something to a particular target group that's your primary aim so you should always give this a deep thought who are these people what could they be interested in and not only what you want to tell them what would be of value to them spending their precious time on remember the internet is full of information and you want to help them doing their job better so one way of doing this is by collecting the questions you hear from your target group over the time you could also turn this around and run some little research and identify certain individuals and specifically ask them what is it that you are interested in to be clarified from our work what would be of interest to you what would help you these sort of questions now the reader's decision on whether he or she wants to go on reading to continue reading is made when looking at the headline the subheader also and the picture sometimes you know we know from social media it has these nice text overlays and maybe also the first lead sentence so the reader needs to be clear about the value to them immediately you should give it a good consideration but to make this clear here it's not so much about the wording as such that you can discuss with me as the editor it's about how you construct this headline and that's why the construction when it's well done it will have a big impact on how you appear and structure your article and that's why you need to give it some thought upfront so i recommend that you visit this site here oh it's in the in the powerpoint which we will circulate it's called jon morrow's 52 headline hacks. so after long years as a newspaper editor morrow has come up with six different types of headlines that he found to be working very well to trigger interest to make it a bit clearer I'm going to jump at number five here the how-to headline category next so what you see now are the samples he gives for how-to headlines that work well in terms of creating traffic they work well because they are naturally geared towards delivering practical value to the reader now the trick to work with the with this resource here is to see the subject of your article your your typical work area to be covered by a headline of the sort remember there are more categories and there's 52 hacks all together so when i say the trick then i mean that clearly you need to be thinking of presenting the story you had in mind in the in the beginning in a different way when using these types of headlines but remember in order to deliver on your headline in your article you need to have a clear idea of it from the beginning so you just can't put a headline like the five most important issues to consider for your behavior change project when you just wrote down a rundown of your latest activity then you can't put that headline on top of your story anymore this is going to take us now to a consideration on how we structure articles and here we have a good headline how covid gave women a voice and then just in case you can't really read it the subheader is gender inclusion through photo voice in ethiopia's afar region so this is good but it could have been even better if we had added something like three key learnings that any project can easily apply or how we failed with this and that while you should know about the details this sort of thing that could have added even more to this structure this is the structure of the article further down which is also good you see in between titles you see a bulleted list which is all easy to grasp visually but if the subheader followed in a simple logic set by the headline it would have been even better for the reader you know so the simple logic it's what you want it's instructive let's go to the next one number nine let's take another example of the snid website the headline here reads measuring empowerment correctly and the subheader is research team at ecp offers insight into new approach lead sentence is how can one gauge progress in women's empowerment in a more meaningful way so let's go to the next one here again you see the visual impression of how the structure looks like now what you could have been what could have been done at the very beginning by adding a how-to concept what would have been that described by headline and giving it an overall structure what is that so let's go to the next one so that's what the headers could have looked like the first two lines yeah how to measure empowerment correctly dash a new five-step approach that can be easily applied by any project and then the numbers one two five there you would fill in the steps and obviously you would elaborate underneath each one of them so what's the advantage of doing all that a the value proposition to the other projects or other readers is clear b the author puts in the work to find the core of the features that are common to the principle of the approach not the reader he or she doesn't have to do that the the writer does it see you have a clear visual structure and d the project becomes an example used for the principle it's not so much in the foreground but you can still intersperse all the information about it that you want to have in the story so let's just note again this is not so much about style and formulation as such it's about setting oneself a useful guideline to a structure that is both clear and driven by an assumed need of the audience let's have a look at some theory here it's called inverting the pyramid which is a special subject under structuring and what it basically means is that you turn the typical scientific writing structure upside down and then you get a journalistic reporting kind of order so a typical article that i get starts broad and narrows down here on the right important conclusions are provided at the end and basically all factors are discussed even though their relevance might be minor typical scientific approach in this pyramid the focus is on what the project wants to tell so the project name is mentioned very early the organization and maybe it's repeated throughout as often as possible okay let's go to the next now this is what our inverted pyramid looks like in this approach the focus is on what people want to hear about the project name and the organization is mentioned sort of in the background at the bottom so people that are interested in it will find it our headline has verbs and triggers interests so we follow a concept called front loading so the most important point comes first and then the second most important point and so forth you need to make sure that you get people to read and then to continue reading otherwise you cannot convey anything because people just have left you know so that's important from bloating and for that you might just pick a particular aspect nothing all-encompassing just a particular aspect next let's move on to content content is king but it's not everything most subject matter experts only want to talk about content obviously it's their thing formatting is something for the communications people but that's a very overly simplistic view in today's social media world the decision on the format has a lot of impact on the content you need to use and since social media have become the most important entry vehicle to draw people to arrive at your website give the visuals opening the visual opening a good consideration they draw attention and when you use pictures throughout the text even you make sure that you have a good caption that will tell what you see and ideally even why the reader sees this picture you can even put a form of your message in there so next one. so let's look at the text part beyond the strategy and structure first one spell out basically all acronyms there are two reasons for this it's easier to comprehend and people don't get annoyed by having to remember an acronym that they will never come across in the future again secondly relevance to search engines if you repeat 10 times the words natural resources management because it's part of your project title and you didn't put it into an acronym the search engines will say hey this must be really about the subject natural resource management so next one is including hyperlinks in your text with that i don't mean that you send me additional information links sort of as a separate blog but embed them in your story in the overall discussion of your subject whatever you want to say make the references to other important articles and websites this raises the relevance for your content both in the eyes of real people and in the sort of eyes of search engines out there so it's hyperlinks yes but it's also framing of your text within a greater discussion and principles that just gives it a whole lot more relevance next one way to crank up your relevance is by cross-checking with the terms you used that you used that those are the most popular or the most fitting to your subject in terms of search engines and you can check that with this website here that i put in there it's called hashtag me.com that's one way of doing it so you put in so it checks hashtags but that doesn't mean that you cannot use terms without the hash or in your articles and you can just see if another term has much more will create much more traffic so ultimately the idea is that you get other websites to link to you if you're interested you can also check morse.commoz.com for a beginner's guide on how to get links back to you stay on the problem and then the solutions that's a key point i mentioned that already but really i want to hammer on this one you need to provide value by showing solutions to common problems so make sure that you go back to the problems again and then provide solutions yeah that'll keep you very focused on what people want to get then i have also a headline on my website called face it nobody cares about your project as such that's a provocative headline i used for an article what i'm getting here is that projects as such are difficult a difficult sale it's better to find another angle to your story and measure your project into it next point is don't praise yourself if you want to do public relations you don't want to do consumer advertisement and pr is about other people talking good about you so use testimonials as little text blurbs or short cell phone videos and you can send that to me and i can edit it for you allow some critical voices in your stories it raises your overall credibility substantially one word on language consider using language that brings you closer to your target group drop titles officialism use a language that is closer to spoken language so when you write the project didn't work on this it's quite different from writing the project did not work on this so use apostrophes where the common language uses it as well because it's a different gives a different feeling to it next slide in the invite to the webinar we wrote that it wouldn't be about style because that's a difficult subject and contributors to the websites have a lot of liberty anyway however here are a couple of points you might want to follow use short sentences with a clear structure subject verb objective maybe a relative clause but avoid using very difficult subordinative clauses stay in the chronological order of the events it's easier to follow avoid passive voice it sounds vague because the reader is left in the dark about who is the actual actor plus it's longer quote people especially indirectly and more than just one or two of them people want to hear what other people have to say so using indirect speech gives it a touch of reporting as people are speaking and obviously use more video especially short video testimonials and we can build them into your articles together next slide number 19. so language is all about how we feature people this is a critical point for us so the gender debate over the last decades brought about a great deal of reflection on language and the asymmetrical power set up it not only manifests but also contributes to racism debates are similar and development cooperation also had its history of difficulties with language and power the latest martial plan for africa which was then re-coined into the marshall plan with africa as just one example so we should avoid featuring individuals in our stories without providing their full name and a more precise description of the work they do so it's first name and last name and it's better to say soybean farmer specializing in so and so than just lindiway farmer avoid a us versus them look and feel or a provider versus recipient sort of picture ideally everything that resembles unnecessary dualisms of this nature but that's not all be aware the issue goes beyond language when we feature a person who has won an award or just a story about someone who owns a farm we should try to make sure to draw a fuller picture of that individual it's a very common it's very common to only include information that seems irrelevant to us especially if it's a project-centered story you need to give more details that honor the person in his or her integrity what are their feelings some empathy for their situation well this doesn't have to be strange or queasy or something like that it's more about giving background how people are feeling and understanding why they do the things in a certain way for example next so to round it off and if i may be allowed here is my website address um if you want you can contact me there or you can find some articles on communications and development on my coreycoms.com website and there's also another website learndevcom.com that's where i put my first course on communication strategy you can look it up the first three four parts are for free so next slide and then we're done you can go over to the questions thank you very much thank you so much pascal maybe you can enjoy the applause people are sending you right now thank you for so clearly and for sharing with us the gist of your long time experience and experience of what really drives communication forward so right now in the chat there were some questions about the slides which we will share as soon as they're off the screen and i would still invite you to just raise your hand if you want to ask the question in person or type it in the chat otherwise i will start with one and it's about the value proposition because for sure we as development projects have a clear goal in objectives and how we work and what are the different indicators we want to reach but how can we without being a marketing expert and without exaggerating so much really find out what is the value proposition do you have maybe an example of guiding questions how we come to that yeah that's a that's a very good point because we're driven by sort of making our client happy and the client wants certain things there's an old saying in agencies you know so one advertisement agency so it creates great billboards for a big company and they have come up with a schedule how they're going to launch what but the company that they hire to put up the actual billboards needs to get some idea when they put up the boards in the next two weeks where they're gonna put the next the first couple boards so what's the answer where do you put them do you have an idea Joy where would you put them above the ground i would say -- okay all right see the point here is the ceo says: well, intern, figure out where the ceo works and where he lives and then the different routes where he's going to work that's where we're going to put up the first boards all right because otherwise he's going to say well we paid so much for this thing and where are the boards i don't see them okay so you in in that agency situation you have always the difficulty you need to make your client happy to give them what they want even though they know it's not really what they want they want the exposure in front of their target group not in front of them but they get stuck so i hope you can see the analogy to what i'm getting at here so the point is if you really want to do what the ministry wants to do you need to get the information to the people that are really relevant to your project so you need to identify that and because people have a lot of information they absorb every day they need to make a decision whether they can spend time on that and in order to get that you need to know more about these people you need to find out who that is and what they want to know and then you can come up and find out what would be of value to them and obviously you would find that you can talk about your project but you need to find things that are in a more abstract sense relevant to them so either it's sort of other projects then you want this knowledge exchange sort of side of things then you can look into your what you learn from your project the processes and put that in more abstract terms so others can immediately see ah that i can use also for my project if you talk to a broader public then then it becomes obviously very difficult you need to identify subgroups,"subpersonas" to find out what they would be interested in and try to satisfy that first and then put in the information that you have of your project to feed that with it so you use another angle i hope that's not too abstract now no i think it's really helpful i mean for sure while doing things there will be more questions arising but it really helps to think of clearly what do i really want to talk about if people only spend two minutes on my article what is the message that should stick and they can tell maybe to their neighbors or to somebody while they're out shopping um yeah so the the is there a question it's just rumbling so yeah well if you want to spend two minutes then it's always a good time to spend those two minutes on leaning back and considering these strategic thoughts first i guess look at those hacks yeah there's 52 of them and obviously that is sort of consumer newspaper type of stuff but if you give it some time you will see uh maybe i could use this or that i just need to reformat this and maybe not so tabloidy sort of thing but it gives you a good idea and then you will see on the other side that it will help you structure your text you get a much clearer structure and that that saves you time. Hi Sven, good to see you. Hi Pascal good to see you too um i'm wondering um i mean you know in cameroon we were doing a communications campaign that was not so much tailored towards international development professionals and european publics but farmers and do you have any hints on how we can best address or target groups because they have very different medias that they use they have very different habits of how they consume media so it's very very different than how we can um how we can address them and how we can interact with them effectively i'm doing the same thing in tunis now where again people in urban areas are very different people in rural areas um do you have a book or maybe some some some advice on how to best understand your audience when it's not people like us yeah very good questions i mean obviously i go in my communication strategy course that i just mentioned i go into that in detail because um i think that the most important step is maybe you've done that already is that you that you become very clear in your strategy that you need to divorce basically in two different strategies if you want or two different parts because this whole um homebound communications i call it you know satisfying groups in in in our home countries you know the donor countries so to speak is very different from that i'm sure you know that but you know in practice it always gets mixed up so you need to really make sure that everybody who's on board is clear that that you're doing something very differently so that's it if you then on the side where you address the groups then also i think it's it's about finding out um what would help these people to get their progress and you will probably find that you set back for maybe one or two months because you feel that oh now what am i going to do because what i wanted to do is not really not really that first of all you need to figure out which communications tools are they actually using yeah and that will that will probably limit you very much so once you have that then you have a clear idea what is their interest and what you know maybe you find out i forgot the english term um when you you know the the the things that are out of the ordinary that you didn't assume that's usually some something if you if somebody says something to you that you didn't expect that's something you should write down that's usually giving you something where you can work with because it tells you hey there's something that i've conceived in a in the wrong way and or i just generalized for a long time and that's spin that thread a bit further and you you get somewhere so those are those are the things find out where they actually live sort of in which media radio and so forth and what what is really driving them then obviously you could say well they don't really know what what they want in a way because they're not really been exposed to certain things and that's where you need to need to be creative in in trying and figuring out what could work so this is something that is is not really done in communications for development i find is this sort of concept of focus groups so give it a chance you know do an a b testing you like pepsi or coke so to speak you know you know this sort of thing tested invite groups online or whatever and test what works with them you know give it some thought because you're going to spend some time on it like an advertisement the agency also would do you spend some time on it test whatever your ideas were is that concrete enough for you Sven? um yeah yeah absolutely especially the the polling and focus group part of what you just said because that is experience that other communications experts here in tunisia have shared with me that they before starting even before starting the strategy process of a campaign that they want to do they do the whole focus groups and polling and i think it's all called polling but um you know just getting a grasp of what might be interesting messages and slogans for for the target group for example so that's really helpful thanks you mentioned this i find that um basically also something with the course that the idea of the strategy is is usually conceived very short it's sort of more what most people have in mind is more a concept of running something rolling something off you know a plan so that doesn't really go together a strategy is something for being flexible on your feet to reach your goal your ultimate goal and you know and for that if you do something like that you should be open and consider who are your target groups and be flexible before you actually sort of consider the rest of your strategy so that's a good advice you get there thanks so thank you so much for your question sven and the exhaustive answer pascal there's uh usman now also raising his hand to ask a question pleases man thank you joy thank you pascal for the very great presentation uh my question will be about based on your experience how do you uh leverage how do you use uh the cultural differences to to create a story or how do you reach like greater audience taking into account different cultures different languages and then mindsets how how as communication professional how do you go about that do you have some hints that you can share with the professionals because i guess just getting uh having a communication degree or having great knowledge in communications that does not necessarily give us all the tools we need to to create impactful stories so do you have some advices in terms of taking into account these different perceptions different level of education different mindset and you were talking about what is it that people want to hear and then what is that what is it that people want to understand and how do you make a balance and then create a story that really speaks to a greater larger audience -- thank you yeah a good point, obviously cultural difference is is very important and if you conceive a sort of strategic idea in some office in in bonn and then you roll it out in rural cote d'ivoire that might be a problem but if you and it's obviously exacerbated by the cultural difference but if you really consider this it's not really that much different if you have a sort of a hip advertisement agency in berlin trying to figure out how to address farmers in rural bavaria in germany it's it's also a cultural difference it's just because of language and so forth we see it differently and that's why these guys would have just mentioned run focus groups because 20, 30 years of experience still might lead them the wrong way because they still have their preconceived ways and they live in a different culture so in a way it's not much different. you need to find out what these people like and what they want to do and what they want to listen to, what helps them that they will get out of it from listening to you, practical things and i think when it comes to typical problems with language and culture and power is that you might get a bit scared because you can you can easily say something wrong and then you're in this sort of political correctness problem and then you feel that you can't get out of it you can't excuse you apologize that makes it worse you can't really straighten it because then you should have apologized rather than so just go be who you are and address these things and figure out who these people are no matter whether they're in another culture obviously you need you need to have language people that can help you with the language that can translate language and also that do it in a cultural way not just sort of words and i find personally one thing that is is not used very much which is which people use when they overcome cultural differences is humor if you build in humor you know awkward situations that's what we do somebody cracks a joke and everything's sort of released again you know even you know even in bad situation someone might start a joke. so obviously it's also difficult but in general, you can try to make approaches in your video clips or whatever you think is your is the pro tool that you want to use a part of your tool set that you want to use that integrates build in some things that are funny um that are visual you know that you can even make this cultural difference to your advantage because you can make a joke about it uh in a way sort of part of the story that germans get always this sort of one way one word wrong and so forth and everybody knows it in in Senegal or so you know and this sort of thing you can build this in and this actually carries your message if it's done well we all know these spots if it's done well and it just goes you know viral maybe even you know yeah yeah thank you pascal and thank you for the response and there's one more question by Ulrike what about target communities with very limited literacy any advice apart from using radio and video ah, that's a good question because we all are very limited in our thinking because we spend so much time in school and then university and all that so we sort of fixated on the idea that everything can be put into writing um I think literacy or you know functional illiteracy is a bit the problem is maybe considered to be much worse for you as a communicator than what it actually is because you can reach these people I mean they live a life like everybody else to a large degree. so there's ways to reach them beyond radio and you know when i worked in south africa there was a new newspaper at the start that we figured out how it was distributed on trucks and there were actually eight people reading each copy and then they were talking to other people so the what i'm trying to get it is make sure that you know who these people are that they talk to where they get their information from that they get you know how can you address them is there a community meeting that they attend is there some pastor or one who they always listen to so you need to find out who these multipliers are that can relay your information that they have an open ear to so which is basically the same advice for for any strategy multipliers obviously you know who's actually has a say to people and you know from research with sort of let's say sports teams this sort of thing we know that not necessarily the coach has the ear of the of of the team but maybe this this one person on the team who always cracks the jokes and you know he's actually moving the the the public sentiment in in the group so figure out who these people are it's not necessarily the ones with the sort of institutional positioning that you that you can only rely on is also other people that are that people are listening to and then figure out how you can address those obviously if they they they should be literate otherwise you need to go one step further even more that's one idea that comes to my mind obviously you you still have um the the other uh the typical theater groups and all that but i'm sure you know that yeah okay thank you thanks, pascal, I have a question so we are financing projects in agriculture research centers around the world basically and my task is a little different than the other questions is to bring it in to the german public like to generate more interest to bring the information on how essential this work is for everyone basically on the planet so could you maybe elaborate a little bit on how I could identify subgroups so you have any advice um because for me it's super difficult just to bring this into the german public we used to have a boost in the IGW like the international green week but well this is all in vain at the moment in corona times anyway so yeah um yeah i know i know that's ILRI is working there for example quite a lot on these uh on the subjects they do a very classic uh media outreach you know post stories and uh you know via consultants it's i think the solution is always to sort of reconsider what you actually want to do and bring it in into a different light so if you if you think you need to put your work in front of the people now my vehicle is blocked because of the green week not happening um that cannot actually make you think more about what what is actually that you want to do so if you have if you have good results not just of the project but sort of basically of the outcome yeah then you should maybe start considering doing more storytelling which is something that i didn't go into very much because um you know would have blown up the whole picture here but the if you the value proposition for other people that are really positively impacted of what you've done with your work is something more than showing a researcher who produces grain which is not was this big and then that big and everybody said okay good great all right so if you if you for that you should probably do some research and figure out who was really impacted ideally obviously over longer time frames and for that you need to really go a bit uh further down and you you know in terms of visuals it becomes difficult and then you make testimonial stories out of that maybe a a set of ten testimonials that you cut together different voices set of four or five questions for each one you select and you bring together a story it's not very expensive to produce but i think what you need to do is you need to start on this early ideally immediately because what you want to do is you want to get a benchmarking so if you want to show progress you need to start you know liking your researchers and scientists probably need to do that benchmark you need to get the status quo picture if you want to show before and after pictures you need to have the before picture so you better get getting this you know in terms of testimonials visuals obviously fields and developments and then if you do the storytelling obviously you bring that into the into the personal side you know that you need to show that that something has value for people that's died here and that's why i said before you need to bring a broader picture of that of that person not just sort of has three kids okay needs more money for the kids to go to school but also you know why is that person there was a story about vermiculture in the last newsletter you know you could have said there was a nice little uh hint at the side that this woman farmer was actually um scared of something of worms and snakes and didn't want to touch it she was quite touchy on on this issue so this would have been something where you could could have built on you could have said what exactly why was it exactly this one person who was most scared of worms and and itsy bitsy about it you know why why was it exactly her and now for you know this sort of personal side and this is what um what people want to read and it's a misconception that sort of scientific readers or people that read for work that they're not sort of affected by these personal things you know i need to stay on this thing like i write a paper for university dissertation it's not like that people like attractive things and a personal connection so these are some ideas on that thank you so much and thank you pascal maybe i can jump in again with a question unless somebody indicates he or she has one and it's about the front loading part because the way we do communications in a lot of times like with our fact sheets or with writing reports it's very important to say who is involved who's the political partner what is the donor is it bim said usaid world bank whatsoever and what is the actual goal and i feel if i apply the front loading i have to turn it upside down and then i'm curious how how the conversation with the bmz will go if i forget to post them in the first sentence and i would like some advice of like how this can be done either in a more elegant way or in a way that maybe the activity of the donor maybe is already a value addition if that is mentioned at a certain point of the article yeah um that's a that's a point that i've always heard you know one thing i mentioned already is if the beginning is already mentioning institutions fully spelled out with these funny parentheses afterwards bmz and then the project name fully spelled out then i immediately get the impression okay this has been written by this project and they want to portray themselves in this in this picture so i'll i probably lose a lot of people. this is something you can say to bmz, that you know if it's sort of like you can consider a social situation online or a pre-corona real-time party you go on to the party and you say ah me we and my name is and you spell it with the you know and this and it's doctor and so and you make this sure you know how much you know do you really get to it that people will really continue listening to it be when you stay too much on that so i've obviously over done it now a little bit but you know just to get it across so that's an argument if people if if people are concerned that they are mentioned they want this mentioning they sort of want to count how many times they were mentioned then they get stuck on that the idea is the ideal thing is you write an interesting story that you can say to them you write an interesting story about something that happened in ghana and it's so interesting that people would want to find out what's behind it and you don't even mention it because then they start to talk to other people about it hey you know what this and this happened and this is great outcome and they say well how is that god i think the germans sort of they they did this and it's this and that you know that's that's the thing that you want yeah you don't want to sort of bash into the door with that information so that's why sort of so-called generic approaches will work well you sort of work on a subject not on a certain tool that you want to promote you work on solving your problem yeah that's the idea and i think that's obviously very hard because you have different layers of hierarchy so who you talk to and they always say them then we i can't get that through and you never know who actually said this you know so when i was a consultant before i said you know let me let me go with you into bmz on the phone and let let me talk to them and that usually worked well but obviously most clients and their supervisors wouldn't allow for the for the consultant to talk to their clients but that usually helped if you sort of make sure that they have a very limited or you clarify to them that is a very limited view on how communications works is sort of you know Seitenbacher, Seitenbacher, Seitenbacher. i mean you don't want that for your bmz project information that you sort of go shopping with your name all the time sorry about Seitenbacher not everybody knows it's a german commercial that's very annoying that just repeats its name all the time however that works for sure yeah that's a muesli for people who eat the grains in the morning like many german people do. so as a takeaway for the session i would say especially us with the sector network where it's about mutual exchange between the different projects and to really benefit from the experiences that somebody in ethiopia made and how i can transfer it into my project to ghana we should try to really think of what is the most important thing what they need to know now maybe even give them a tailored approach how we done it and what they can use like a real order like almost like a small recipe without being too shy of saying there might be even some um not everything will be perfect but for you to get started on um but before you comment maybe johanna who just raised her hand wants to come in as well uh yes thank you thank you very much for your presentation it was very interesting um i just have a quick question i don't know if you've already mentioned that because it came in a bit later um and but my question really is because communication has a lot to do as well with internal communication and like to establish like good processes that you're informed about uh the activities that are going on and i mean like when you manage like larger projects that can be really challenging and i just wanted to know whether you have any tips on how to really establish kind of these processes that you are really informed of what is going on and that you get the news of when there is an interesting story to tell for example and don't miss that opportunity okay a very interesting point because obviously communications is a profession and uh in many projects and you know this sort of thing is not really reflected upon so you need for professional approach you need workflows and you need to establish those and you need to make sure with your supervisors that you are that you get sort of your juror fix for your for your communications maybe once a month uh that you sort of have a communication strategy that is not something put into the drawer with funny words on it but that you have sort of a sketch of a plan what you want to do you want to do so and so many testimonials and that and that for that i need to have access to these and these people if i'm new in the project please introduce me to those people uh mr solomon and mrs so-and-so yeah and if that doesn't work what you could do is um i suggest you do a sort of social media roundtable or something you find a nice subject about the uh let's say the the the situation of your sector agricultural sciences sector in your country or in your region and who are people that you would want to invite to give input so maybe some people from parties public relations offices from parties or to a local level you have some newspaper people that you want because journalists quite often are the ones that you want to sort of go you know get contacted they there for 20 years they have the context that you want and they maybe helped you so you have a nice round table the typical thing with some food and some entertainment and maybe you have a um a kickoff like we had today with me a kickoff sort of little seminar or a a you know a little paper that's presented with state of the sector so-and-so input by the leader you bring these people together and then you make sure that you make your contacts with these people and then you stay in contact and you say can i come to your editorial and see how you're working there just you know you make sure that they not only come to you you visit them and you this sort of thing different people so journalists pros from political parties business leaders you know and then you you can bring that together what i've done once was sort of a scenario planning for the business you know you get a scenario planner somebody who's in this gives an input and has a facilitated discussion on how these people think their business is going to evolve three different scenarios so that gives you the outer frame because no it's more difficult to get people together if you just want to talk about communications yeah very interesting thank you very much for this clarification just a follow-up question because you mention it like because i think also personally i think like these multiplicators you mentioned like journalists that can like really uh make the topic a lot bigger because they have a bigger audience with their natural like followers and newspapers how can you really target them and make make them interested in your topic like what um do you what would you suggest is it like an interesting story or um yeah well um in most countries you can try and start with these sort of foreign association there is sort of your natural contact as being from all overseas they're usually very well connected you know depends on the country they have a list that they probably give to you because it's not sort of european data protection so that you will easily get it yeah and then you can get them together for the local journalists what you want to do is if you establish your contacts it's sort of the same same thing as keep on repeating myself maybe you want to know what they want to talk about you know what is on their schedule they have a schedule they have the reporting on the elections but they're covering the royal rural development portfolio so they have certain stories that they want to cover and you want to be ahead of the game and know when they have time so first of all don't call them in the afternoon if they print you know then they type their stories in the mornings and then but you want to know what they how you can feed into their story so you need to be satisfied with being having a small mention in their story not maybe even with your name but with what what is of value to to you maybe it doesn't say johanna it doesn't say GIZ that it doesn't say the project but maybe it talks about the subject that you want to get across you know that's what you want and that's why you need to know what are they covering when what is their sort of schedule that they have it's their major publications coming out like um quarter lease or something bigger things maybe with uh paying clients you know that put advertisements in there or paid stories with um sort of pr journalists work on because you want to get in contact with them and see how can i help you what do you need for the story do you have a website thing hey you're gonna cover something we have some money we're gonna produce a b-roll you know some footage that you can just without mentioning us put into your story if you if you can't afford to go there and you need some pictures from this grain or from the tractors how they move in there we produce some b-roll or you have it available fact sheets and these sort of things on the print side yeah thank you really much what i really read into that is like the communication before the actual communication inspiration yeah yeah oh thank you thank you very much maybe i want to mention this like the other work other people are doing you know communications has like this typical setup like everything in life it has a pre-production, a production and a post-production phas. obviously in our world here we are fixated too much on the production side you know which is sort of sometimes called ad-hoc-ism or whatever but that doesn't really fit you need to plan your stuff be flexible with the planning because you're not you can't plan what other people are doing so you know like journalists but you you can already set up you know what you want to be what you want to have in the future you want to have so many testimonials you want to have a bigger video on this and you want to be there's maybe a crisis around the election coming up so who's gonna comment on this in case our project our office is sort of being touched on that who could comment on that could that be our office lead or is that person maybe not so good on camera could the consultant do that do i need a team to do this can we do this online do we need to get somebody on retainer or figure out already who that would be and what that will cost so you can do this sort of anticipatory strategic planning yeah and that gives you you know and what what is sort of the the calendar of events that the journal is covering all these sort of things and then obviously give time for post-production as well and that doesn't only mean that you work on videos and cutting them but also that you know after the event is obviously before the event so you need to create continuity one of the things that is left out quite a lot we can talk about that in maybe some other sessions you know some of the basic core things you need to do credibility continuity relatability these these sort of things we can i took that out the presentation this time because obviously it would have also you know gone way too far but that's very important that you always consider how you continue your relationship to your information providers what you can give to them obviously very important like any human relationship and you know what's the continuity of your reporting no i talked enough okay thank you yeah that was almost like a closing statement but also like a start because as you said there's a lot more to talk about than what fits in this hour so because this one was the first time we were doing this thank you also for your courageous instinct pascal for testing this and we are dependent on your feedback so please let us know if you like the sessions what are other topics you might be interested in there was also a lot of appreciation in the chat already pascal saying how precise it was it was really fantastic things somebody says it was really helpful and really amazing so before we have to lose the other people because it's a little bit beyond the time we would end this session but knowing the communication should uh continue and remain so please drop us a message for next topics or any feedback you have and the last word is with you pascal as you were our guest of honor today and then thank you everyone for joining you know what um communications people relay information i would you know maybe Ousmane wants to say something he in the preparation he had something to say if he's still ready and it's not too cold-called now by me and i would give it to him Ousmane are you still there dropped out okay well I didn't hear you very well I wanted to throw the ball over to you because in our preparation you sort of gave good reflection and if I reflect on myself is sort of like editing my own stories doesn't really work that well so why don't you say what you think is the main takeaway for you in terms of value proposition and what you would like to see in the future well in terms of a takeaway so i would say that given what you have said and the the lessons you have learned that it's very important for us as communication professionals to really understand what is it that what are the expectations of our audiences what is it that message that you want to convey and then how we want to convey it and then it's important taking into account different factors and taking into account the expectations and then taking into account mainly the headlines in terms of headlines the headlines is very very important as well as the sub headlines because they are the things that can help us um really keep our readers who are creating a story so it's important than to keep our readers because they have they are receiving a lot of information out there so if you want to sell our text if you want to our readers to read our our story we really need to captivate their attention and then one of the things that are really very important is the choice of words in terms of headlines and the choice of in term of sub headlines and then also it's important uh creating your story to start from the very most important things like uh from the top to the down what is it that the most important things that people are interested in so based on your understanding based on the background and then from the top to the down you follow the the hierarchy of what you think is important for people to know or what you think is important for people to read about so i think these are very important takeaways for for me as communications uh professional and also um something else that you talked about as key also takeaway i think you talked about you explain about the uh cultural differences and then i think uh taking into account all these factors and then using them as tools can help us create impactful stories uh that speaks to a broader audience so definitely these are really very important hints and takeaways for me pascal thank you so much thank you very much you know it's good for me to see that this was received and really recorded i can see you grasped all the all the nitty gritty and everything there so that's good to see so maybe the question to you and to everybody else for the chat box is if you have anything that you are really keen on hearing the next time so just let us know yeah and then over to your joy and want to take away the moderation part from you sorry about that that's fine i gave you the last word you gave it to us so it came back to me thank you everyone i think you can close the session see you all next time and have a good continuation cheers bye-bye bye-bye thank you so much everyone bye thank you thank you bye