Mind the Communication Gap...

Gunawardene argues that
development experts have largely failed to communicate the development message in words
that the public can understand. He proposes a simple test for development workers and United Nations (UN) officials: "explain
to the humblest non-technical person in the office the core message and
relevance of your work." Most, Gunawardene theorises, would fail this test.



Examples of the communication gap are drawn from a recent meeting at the Asian Development Bank in
Manila where experts discussed how to get governments to take the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) more seriously.
At the meeting, banners were displayed that read "eliminate gender disparity", "reduce child mortality" or "integrate the
principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes"
- phrases which, for the majority,
"obfuscate rather than communicate" the development message.



Gunawardene notes the much greater success that  entertainers like Bob
Geldof and Bono have had in communicating the poverty message to mass audiences.
He proposes that experts can learn from such approaches, and provides a series of communication tips
for engaging media in order to reach greater audiences
with the development message (abbreviated below):

• Go beyond the ‘broadsheet’ mentality. Broadsheet newspapers are influential
  with policy-makers and business leaders, but the mass outreach is with the
  tabloids - and their broadcast equivalents. 
• Try the NIT test: Before reaching out to the media with a story or op-ed
  piece, it always helps to ask three basic questions: Is it new? Is it
  interesting? And is it true? A triple hit enhances chances of media interest.
• Rise above mere publicity. The trouble with many UN agencies and development
  charities is that they can’t discern between institutional publicity and
  issue-based awareness raising. The latter is far more important in shaping
  public policy agendas, yet much of the time, effort and money are spent on
  simple publicity that massages the egos of a few.
• Move away from geekspeak: The intellectual rigours of evidence-based,
  scientific analysis have to be balanced with clarity and accessibility of our
  messages.

Gunawardene looks for inspiration to successful communicators of the past. He notes
James Grant, former executive director of UNICEF, who compared the thousands of children
dying everyday
from preventable diarrhoeal diseases to several jumbo jets full of children crashing everyday
- while nobody
took any notice. Such messages and images make the situation real to a broader audience. Gunawardene points out
that "We don't want to find that we missed the chance of a millennium - to do a few
things right in development - because we were too busy chattering among
ourselves."

[This article was published on the OneWorld South Asia website on September
13 2005. A related article was published by the same author on SciDev.Net on September 12 2005 as Simpler Words are Needed to Get MDG Message Across.]