We all have different definitions for the term “digital communications.” We need to reach an agreement.
Everyone has their own understanding of the meaning of digital communications. Eva Appelbaum, a London-based digital strategist, tells us how we can reach a shared understanding to get our message across.
Elyse:
Welcome to Decoding Digital, episode one of Digital What?!, a podcast series where we join UNDP personnel and experts in conversation about your digital communication questions you’ve always wanted to know, but were afraid to ask.
We began this podcast series asking you what digital communications means in 2020
Estelle:
That’s a really hard question, harder than you think.[laughs]Is it right?
Dominique:
That’s a good question, I don’t know, I think...
Victor:
Well, huh….
Marley:
That’s a hard question…
Nisar:
Ahhh, for me I would say…
Alice:
Um, okay…[laughs]. So basically, ahh…
Elyse:
and you surprised us with your answers...
Victor:
So this my inner geek answering now…
Avis:
It’s the medium, it’s the people.
Yosief:
It’s amazing, you don’t need to be in one place to perform your job.
Aden:
You know some of these platforms are double-edged swords.
Elyse:
We learned that everyone has a different interpretation of what digital communications is, and that our approach and preferences when using various channels to communicate are deeply personal.
Eva:
The very first question is, what do you think everyone means by digital? And if... people feel able to admit this, they will say either, I'm not really sure, or they'll give an answer that is completely different than the person next to them. So if you start by making people see that actually nobody really understands what we mean, then the solution becomes obvious, which is that we have to then come up with a shared understanding.
Elyse:
That’s Eva Appelbaum. She’s a digital strategist and co-founder of the Arc group, an organization based in London that helps businesses get fit for the digital age. When we asked Eva to define digital communications, she asked us to step back and think about how we use the word digital entirely.
Eva:
Especially as we're going into 2020, it's become really unhelpful to define digital communication because we've gotten to a point where digital has become an unhelpful term. And I say that because nobody really can clearly define anymore what they mean when they slap digital in front of another word. It can become very vague and it is often a huge part of the barriers to meaningful transformation in organizations.
So if reaching consensus on a single definition of digital communications can send us spinning, what do we do?
Eva:
We need to think about how to drop the word digital and think about just the communications.The digital has become shorthand for how to communicate in a world where how we communicate has changed rather than digital is in and of itself a thing.
Elyse:
Digital communications influences how and who we can communicate with, but it doesn’t change the nature of communication. So, if we start with thinking about how we naturally communicate, then we can see that digital communication gives us the tools, to simply do what we do already.
Eva:
You can't opt out of the world that we're in now. Therefore we need to build understanding of technology enabled communications across all disciplines that everyone really needs to understand it because we need everybody to contribute to how we want to shape it into the future.
Elyse
Too often, technology feels like this unstoppable force that is going to change our lives whether we like it or not. And it doesn’t have to be that way.
Eva:
The old conversations that we used to have, or that you still hear a lot where the focus is in technology and therefore people can opt out entirely the conversation by saying, "Well, I don't really understand technology so this isn't for me.
Elyse:
Throughout her career, Eva has seen how easily people doubt their own skills and almost become paralyzed when digital communications platforms replace forms of communication that we are more familiar with. While working at the BBC, she was embedded with the Planet Earth team. And when she got there, she was shocked by what she saw:
Eva:
It was almost like a case study of something psychological that happens in organizations where you have this amazing production team who were making the most beautiful television ever, right? They did Planet Earth II and they did Blue Planet II.
And were solving all of these amazing problems with technology by the way, because you need to use technology to understand how to get down to the bottom of the ocean or how to use drones to film or to get up onto the top of the Himalayas.
But they had been told over and over again that the future was digital storytelling and that they did television so they didn't understand digital storytelling. So they were hugely apologetic about the fact that, "Well, we know that television may be dying and what we do is really old fashioned and we probably don't understand any of it and I guess none of us will have jobs in a few years and we don't get this stuff." Whereas all I could see were these people who had the most amazing storytelling skills, who were using technology in hugely creative ways, were the opportunity to use them to create fantastic, digital content but their belief in themselves taking up that space was below zero because they had been told that they weren't digital storytellers. And we do ourselves a huge disservice by excluding people that way while actually what we should be doing is trying to include them to the biggest possible degree.
Elyse:
Eva focuses on building up people’s confidence with digital technology by tending to the human side of all of this. She urges people to slow down a bit. Take a breath. Communicate. Recalibrate.
Eva:
So my appeal to everyone would be to almost force yourself to get together in a room and make a decision about what you really mean by digital, right? It doesn't matter what everyone else says it is, just decide what you think you mean when you say it so that you have a shared understanding and everybody is on the same page.
Elyse:
So, to feel comfortable communicating in such a mercurial environment, first figure out how you communicate and what definition of digital communications works for you. Then find out what communications tools work best for your target audience. In other words, go to your communications toolshed, and pick out the tool that works best for you, just like Francisco Filho has been doing throughout his fifteen years of working at the UN.
Francisco:
Look, I use a lot of social media tools. I spent a lot of time in my career on WhatsApp or traveling to the suburbs, talking to people, going to the church, going to rap battles, going to a place that we normally don't go to, but we should be able to do so.
Elyse:
By immersing himself in the communities he worked with, Francisco learned a lot about how certain digital communications platforms can make all the difference in reaching his target audience.
Francisco:
In Rio de Janeiro our main tool to talk to 196 musicians we were working with to produce songs related to sustainable development in human rights was Facebook. I also worked a lot with WhatsApp when we were doing the notion action campaign to produce 30-second videos and make them viral on WhatsApp. This was very challenging for me in the past because most of our managers would evaluate some of our work results by the number of emails that we send or how many hours you spend in front of your computer. But this is old-fashioned, this doesn't work anymore.
Elyse:
Originally from Brazil, Francisco is currently based in NYC and Stockholm working as a Communications and Strategic Outreach Specialist with a joint Swedish Environmental Protection Agency program that focuses on the mining sector.
Francisco:
The most exciting part of my work is the Young Environmental Journalist project. It is a pilot project that we started this year in partnership with the United Nations volunteers. We were working with 71 young environmental defenders and young journalists in Colombia, Kenya, Mongolia and Mozambique to have them produce interesting new stories about what's going on in terms of environmental protection and human rights issues in the mining sector. It is a very sensitive topic because those four countries, they depend a lot on mining.
Elyse:
While working on this pilot project, Francisco started using new digital communications tools to aid the young activists on the ground with getting past the communication barriers they faced.
Francisco:
Every single country had a different challenge and a different reality. In Mozambique, our young environmental journalists, only one had access to internet at home. In Mongolia, we have a problem with the government oversight of internet content So, we used a lot of WhatsApp. Colombia was very different because Colombia, everyone has access to WhatsApp, to Facebook, to Google, there's no government issues and has a very independent media. And in Kenya it was wonderful because despite the fact that most of our young environmental journalists did not have access to internet at home, they were all able to use the internet at their schools, universities and community center.
So, we worked a lot with a technologies like for example, GoToMeeting, wherever we can talk to them and do video conferences; it doesn't require a lot of good internet connection.... We had also developed workspaces using Slack. And each country had its own workspace on Slack - where they had the groups and were sharing information.
So when we talk about digital communications, we cannot take for granted the people would have access to the internet. That's a basic thing. And know from my own country people have access to internet in their mobile phones, not in the computer, so that's why Slack, the platform that we use, that was mobile-friendly, was very helpful because when you don't have internet in your computer, you need to have a mobile-friendly platform to share information.
Elyse:
While working on projects based in the developing world, it’s essential to have an awareness of which digital communications tools are logistically appropriate and accessible in specific countries and to also know what tools resonate culturally for officials and citizens.
This is especially relevant for Estelle Fach, a Programme Specialist in Governance and Accountability for the UN Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. We caught up with her in Geneva and also while she was on mission in the DRC.
Estelle:
Yeah, I adjust my approach and the tool that I use actually. Because we always start by email, then it goes to WhatsApp and then it goes to you know, picking up the phone. There's a point where you think exchanging comments with document is not going to work. Let's take it to a more likely way of communicating. Whereas there’s others’ that like to see things in writing because it documents the progress and the agreements that we have. So for me it's really about figuring out, how the other person likes to communicate so that I can adapt and get to more fluid conversations.
Elyse:
She communicates with three different groups who all come from very different contexts: one) policymakers, decision makers, and donors in the E.U.,; two) government partners in the DRC and Equatorial Guinea, and three) with the implementing agencies on the ground who physically go in and plant the trees and seedlings.
Estelle:
So we represent a coalition of donors who want to really scale up funding to help Central African countries preserve their forests. We're trying to reach the decision-makers both in the donor countries so that we manage to mobilize more funds but also in the countries that we support so that the reforms that they carry with our funding are sustainable over the long term. And they're very different audiences to communicate to from donor or recipient countries, I think….
Elyse:
Increasing awareness and mobilizing support for her work from her public audience is challenging -- it’s hard to know which platforms to use and what content to post.
Estelle:
Well, I maintain the Twitter account for CAFI, for the Central African Forest Initiative, so that's one of the main medium I think that I go on every day, try to post updates about what we do on a daily basis. We've always been told that it's super boring to post pictures of a meeting with people, but this is the only thing that I'm seeing when I'm on a mission, in a room with a lot of people sitting around the table and talking. and I also find it time-consuming to craft things that are more powerful, and I think people tend to think that because it's on Twitter it's fast, but it's not. To do a proper Tweeter message with the exact right picture and the exact right message, it takes a lot more time than people tend to think. I find that identifying the real target audience that you have is a challenge that we all have, so we all tend, I think, to want to communicate to everyone at the same time, and I'm not sure that's exactly the right, or the most strategic option.
Eva:
"We don't want you to jump into just chasing whatever's shiny and sexy. We want you to still apply all of your amazing skills in terms of thinking about policy, in terms of thinking about strategy, in terms of thinking about how you deliver on your goals." And then the technology will be there in order to shore up what you're trying to do.
Elyse
As Eva expressed, finding our place in this digital revolution, requires stillness, no matter how fast everything is changing around us.
Francisco:
Look, for me, communications is a lot about listening. I think if you want to have an effective digital strategy in UNDP, you need to be aware that we are a field organization. We are not a New York city organization. So, we need to be aware that people have different challenges. You need to be very humble and in need to provide solutions that are tailored to very specific situations.
For example, when we were working in the suburbs of Rio, one of the most important communications tools that we had to invite people to participate in our rap battles, in our rock concert was that carro de som. In Portuguese, it means like a car that has a loud speaker and goes around the streets in the suburbs telling people, "Come, come. We have this interesting rap battle today at the community center. We have free food, we have free juice." That was a very powerful way to communicate with people that don't have access to internet at home or even in their mobile phones.
Francisco:
I'm so proud of being part of UNDP, because you UNDP represents the whole world. ….I don't think there's any other place where we can always be learning and always be evolving, as UNDP and digital communications and the digital transformation, I think, will make UNDP a better and more wonderful place to work.
Elyse:
On the next episode of Digital What?, we will talk about the foundations of digital communications, the latest trends, and why they matter in your daily work life at UNDP.
This episode of Digital What? is produced by Oscar Durand and myself. Original music by Lemon Guo and sound design by myself. Special thanks to our expert Eva Appelbaum of ARC , and our colleagues Estelle Fach, Francisco Filho, and Zein Mahjoub for taking the time to speak with us for this episode. To listen and subscribe go to wherever you find your podcasts or DigitalNow DOT UNDP DOT org.
I’m Elyse Blennerhassett. Stay with us.