Communicating for social change

Gerald Frape is a social issues communicator who has been working for 35 years with government and non-government organizations on a wide range of social and environmental issues. Recently he visited Auroville again and shared his knowledge with a variety of social project teams and individuals.

What is your approach?

Whenever I come, I try to share my knowledge with groups and individuals working in the area of social change. My aim was to help them effectively communicate these issues to the audiences they were trying to reach.

My approach is more dialogic than top-down. I begin by trying to find out what sense the audience makes of the issue. Only after I have understood this do I design the communication strategy. Particularly when you’re working in a cross-cultural context, you really need to check your ideas with your target audience while planning your strategy.

Most social change projects require about three quarters of the time to plan and research and only about a quarter to execute. However, the tendency in Auroville is to miss out the first step. Most people here think they know what needs to be communicated and how to do it, or they think their idea is so good that everybody will like it, so they immediately put out a brochure or start a website or a blog.

This time, for example, I worked with a young man who wanted to provide computer training to young people living in the rural villages. He saw this as a means of rural regeneration, but I doubted that these students would want to stay in the village and suggested he conduct focus group discussions with rural students at Pondicherry University. He met with the students and discovered that after doing computer training they all wanted to work in urban areas because this is where employment opportunities existed.

Another striking example of the need to consult first with your target audience occurred in Auroville ten years ago. Dr Devashish asked me to help him get the villagers to use toilets. For him the health implications were obvious. Typhoid is endemic in this area and toilets would greatly decrease its incidence. But he had not been successful in communicating this. So I said, let’s find out what toilets actually mean to the local village. Using the women health workers in his team we conducted a survey in the villages and found that toilets meant different things to different people. For women it meant privacy, for men it meant status – they said that if you had a toilet in the house they could get a wife from the city! – and for young people it meant progress. Preventing typhoid alone would not motivate any of these people to have a toilet. So the best approach to get them to use toilets would be to appeal to each of these groups in a different way.

So each social project requires a unique approach?

The basic approach is the same. I designed a workbook for Auroville social projects to explain this. It is a distillation of many years of work and includes some of the more effective communication frameworks for advocating social issues. The exercises helped the project teams develop a communication strategy by asking them what they were trying to do, who they were aiming at, what the target audience thinks about it etc. [see box]

Who did you work with this time?

I have been working with a number of Aurovilian groups and individuals over the last four weeks. They included the Eco Femme and WasteLess groups, and individuals working with gypsy children and Irula tribals, as well as people from the Sustainable Livelihood Institute (SLI).

I began by giving all of them a three-hour intensive workshop based on the workbook. Then I met with each group and questioned them about what they were doing. After this, I helped them develop a better communication strategy. WasteLess, for example, had produced ‘Pick It Up’ cards to make children aware of waste issues. However, it was only a tool, not a whole programme, and this made it less effective. So now they have developed a four or five week education unit that can be delivered into schools with a card game embedded in it as an educational tool.

Everybody who pre-tested what they were planning to do on their target audience changed their original approach as a result. For example, John Peter the Tamil Social Worker planning to educate gypsy kids and provide them with livelihoods, was operating alone. Now he realizes he needs to network with people who have worked with gypsies to learn from what they have done.

Again, one of the team members at Eco Femme, Melanie Le Febvre, had designed a thoughtful graphic storyboard to show why village women should be using their reusable sanitary product. When we pre-tested it with a group of young Indian women, they were able to point out some of the errors and provide nuanced insights into meanings we had not even thought of. For example, one panel showed a bath and a washing machine, which village households don’t normally have. Similarly, the toilet illustrated was a western rather than an Indian one. It was also pointed out that the woman in the panel holding the Eco Femme product was so confident of its effectiveness that she was sitting on a white couch.

The pre-testing has refined the storyboard and made it a much more effective and culturally-resonant communication tool.

What were your reflections after your visit this time?

Connectivity is the younger generation’s zeitgeist and Auroville needs to develop its connectivity to the larger world – particularly India, for it is a showcase for what is possible in this country.

I also think Auroville could adopt a more integral approach to sustainability. There are various people here doing things that are about sustainability, but there is no integrated strategy based upon using it as a core principle. Sustainability asks basic questions about what are we doing and where are we going. For example, is the New Age ‘Club Med’ tourism that I see elements of here at present, sustainable?

Actually, I see a great opportunity here for socially-engaged tourism, for people who want to offer their skills for a short time to a worthwhile project. ‘Voluntourism’ has grown enormously over the past decade in the outside world. It is like this generation’s activism – if you want to make a difference in the world, you go and work on a social engagement project – and Auroville is perfect for this. And it’s not just younger people. There are many projects here that need high-level expertise, and there are consultants who would be happy to come in for a month, tune up your projects, and hook you up to a bigger picture and bigger funding prospects. But there needs to be a formal process, a better portal, to bring these people in. Auroville needs to share much more about what is happening here, and it should also make it much easier for socially-engaged visitors who want to help to connect with their skills and expertise.

I have been really heartened by working with the younger Aurovilians. The older generation needs to let this next generation come through and, for this to happen, mentoring is very important. I encouraged the younger Aurovilians I worked with to tap on the shoulder some of the older, experienced Aurovilians they respect and ask them to become their mentor. Mentoring is a great way to build the future human unity. And this is what Auroville is about, isn’t it?

Use this checklist to plan your social project communications and think deeply about your strategy.

• What is you aim (what you want to achieve)?

• What are your objectives (steps to take to achieve that aim)?

• What policies, infrastructures and incentives will assist your project?

• What is the problem/issue?

• What is the solution?

• Who is responsible for creating the problem/issue?

• Who has the power to solve the problem/issue or create desired change?

• Identify the opinion leaders who may act as intermediaries, communicators or early adopters of the desired social change.

• What will convince them to solve the problem/issue or make the change?

• What is their primary self-interest?

• Who do they listen to?

• Which individuals or groups are most likely to create the desired social change?

• What stage are they at in relation to the social change?

• What knowledge and skills do they need?

• What incentives to change will be most attractive to them?

• Who are they most likely to listen to and be influenced by?

• What structural or environmental changes will help them to change?