When UNHCR Central Asia tasked Transcultural Campaigning with developing a communication strategy for the region, they were lagging behind in so many fields. Less than 8 months later, the organisation is able to brandish a modern bilingual website, considerable presence in social media and lots of content on all UNHCR channels.
UNHCR Central Asia was able to turn around its whole public presence so swiftly due to trhee decisive factors:
Institutional readiness
Many UN offices just do not care too much about public appearances, they do their “real” work but do not showcase their achievements. The Regional Representative in Almaty, Yasuko Oda, saw the unused potential of Public Information for amplifying the impact of the office’s work.
A tailor-made communication strategy
Transcultural Campaigning evaluated the state of Public Information at the offices as well as the communication environment in each of the countries of the region. We developed a strategy that could be realistically implemented with a slight increase of resources.
Increase of communication capacities
Communication capacities were increased in three ways: existing staff were trained in journalistic writing and the use social media. Additional capacities were added by hiring one in-house communicator at regional level and a few contracts with local agencies and/or internships for media students in the country offices.
Half a year later the office is engaging in corporate communication by using updated visibility materials and producing a regular flow of news and feature stories for various media outlets. It is campaigning around events and strategic goals such as World Refugee Day, important conferences and the Nansen Award. Social media presence has been boosted massively and the number of followers on Facebook and Twitter keeps growing. Multimedia tools now include a whole photo library as well as videos of all key events.
