Ways communication can support ILRI’s research work …

APM 2013: How do we improve collaboration and communication within ILRI

This week, Nairobi campus hosts a number of communication awareness and training activities. Here Ewen Le Borgne reflects on ways ILRI can make better use of knowledge sharing and communication.

ILRI is, rightly, putting communication at the centre of its operations. ILRI’s Director General Jimmy Smith repeatedly pleads for more, better communication, internally and externally.

Communication can improve and should improve at ILRI, provided two conditions are met:

Everyone at ILRI realises that communication is everyone’s business and that the failures and limitations of communication are not just due to the communication team’s work – Communication works with everyone’s efforts. But that’s not really the purpose of this post.
That all ILRI staff realise the potential of communication to support their work, to its full extent…

The second point seems to have been somewhat blurred in the mind of many ILRI staff members. There is certainly no reason for them to blame themselves. Communication is often misunderstood by people to cover only two sets of activities: public relations (or awareness at ILRI) and publishing and design.

This echoes the lifetime of a conventional – and let’s agree, slightly antiquated – research project: Big bang activities to introduce the project at its launch, then a long time without much communication and finally another set of activities at the end to lay out and publish the research findings in a set of neat technical reports, in addition to journal articles that are dealt with externally.

Nothing wrong with that, except it’s a very incomplete picture.

Communication is more than public awareness and publishing!

At ILRI, we support research teams in a variety of ways, on public/external activities and on private/internal activities, at the forefront of our research work and from a back-office support. With full support of the entire communication team, KMIS, PA and embedded staff alike.

And we combine, or rather we power communication with knowledge management to complement and strengthen ILRI’s ongoing efforts to disseminate, to fluidify information and knowledge flows and to increase joint reflection and learning for improved action.

Here are some ways we do this:

Internally and from the back-office:

We train research teams to use a variety of tools that can improve their own effectiveness as individuals or as teams.
We support and coach these teams in the deployment of communication activities and services strategically (at the onset of the project and all along the way) and operationally in making day-to-day decisions to adjust communication activities as deemed fit.
We support publishing and design, not just by editing documents but also encouraging thinking about alternative publishing types (e.g. audio, video, presentations) and formats, layouts etc.
We document activities and processes, not just minute-taking, but effective documentation of key decisions and insights, at events, in other project activities and in a variety of formats again.
We also support writing and editing, and when we do not have the technical competence to help, we can help you find alternative outsourced solutions.

Find more information on our comms wiki

Externally and from the front-office:

We provide high end public awareness support, with the help of world renowned agencies such as Burness Communications, to ensure that your initiative is known, lands in the right hands and ears, in the right formats for the right audiences and at the right time. We help you identify and craft your key messages and sharpen your skills to present your work, get confident and impactful at public speaking, technical writing etc.
We help you keep track of all the outputs that your initiative produces, archived for ever on Mahider, with a guarantee that you can find these outputs again and can re-use and embed them ad infinitum. We publish these outputs and stories around them on websites, blogs, social media, traditional media, to ensure the best dissemination strategy possible.
We work with you on improving knowledge sharing and engagement, online (using social media, emails and other means) and offline in your events and conversations. We can advise you on the choice of channels and tactics to use, we think along to make sure that your workshops and other face-to-face activities deliver to their utmost vis-à-vis their objectives, and that you, your team and your partners remain up-to-date throughout the time.
We can help you think through your approach to reflection, learning, collective analysis and to some extent the monitoring and evaluation of your activities, to ensure that you make the right decisions and use insights at soonest and for fullest benefits.