How we are Deploying Strategic Communication Tools to Drive Electoral Reforms — Moshood Isah, Media Officer, Yiaga Africa
Effective communication is crucial for non-profit organisation (NGO), especially the one working on democratic governance and civic engagement. A clear communication strategy can help a non-profit organization to achieve its goals and objectives by reaching out to key stakeholders, including government officials, community leaders, and the general public.
By effectively communicating its message, an NGO can build support for its cause, mobilize resources, and influence policy decisions.It’s communication strategy should be tailored to its specific goals and target audience. For example, an organisation working on electoral reform may need to communicate with government officials and political leaders to advocate for changes for election laws and regulations and more importantly with local leaders and community members to build support for its programs and initiatives.
In addition to traditional communication channels such as press releases and media outreach, NGOs can also use social media and other digital platforms to reach a wider audience and engage with stakeholders. These platforms, no doubt can be use to share information and updates, build relationships with key influencers, and mobilize support for its cause.
In a chat with spokesperson’s digest, Moshood Isah, a media officer with Yiaga Africa, dissected how effective communication tools was deployed for promoting democratic governance, human rights and civic engagement.
Why is Media Relations Vital to Non-profits organisation?
Media Relation is vital because they set of people that will actually amplify your activity. They have followers from your target audience. That means, it’s important that you have very good relationship with your media.
Firstly, you need to ensure that the relationship is not transactional in nature. You build a good relationship with your media cohort, beyond just the normal transactional activities. so it’s good to have a good very relationship with media because you have opportunity to amplify your activities and even when you have negative signal about your organization, you should have media at your ‘beck and call’ to actually reach out, amplify issues and then of course, this will enable you reach large audience as possible, and also use that to promote your activities and vision.
In addition to that, if you need people to take certain actions. You actually need the media to amplify this activity to make people take the desirable action. So it’s important to build that good relationship with media cohorts in your community.
Yiaga has been a strategic stakeholder in early warning signal for 2023 General election, what are your stakeholder engagement communications tools you have deployed on this?
Well, it’s actually a whole lot but I will just do a bit of summary. I’ll focus on early warning signals and the idea is, firstly, we review the structure around all the states and local government in Nigeria. So, one of our projects interventions is “watching the votes” which have state coordinators or state focal person in all 36 states, and also has state local governments supervisors in all 774 local governments.
And the idea is to deploy them and enable them to observe the pre-election environments, issues around hate speech, and indicators for violence that could impact on the electoral process. So that is how you build early warning signal. If there is information around states, hate speech around Violence indicators, like you know restriction of the use of state facilities for instance, some incumbent governors are preventing opposition from using the state stadiums and all that.
So these are things that could trigger electoral violence. So what we do is to observe, and then that document all those information and release reports. But first things first, we engage our stakeholders, like Independents Electoral Commission (INEC), Police and other agencies to report all these issues and share our recommendations.
What are the strategic communication tools for a successful nonprofit organizations Communication intervention?
It is peaceful and safe, and anything that will before the election to actually impact on the election day. So what do you do actually observe the pre-election environment, provide recommendations for election stakeholders like INEC and police to be able to take the necessary action that will prevent escalation of election violence. So these are in brief what we do with our early warning system building in order to prevent electoral violence. So as soon as we see a trigger of violence before we won’t escalate to the media, we actually reach out to security agencies in those locations.
So the idea is, we actually also conduct advocacy visits to those media agencies. I mean, security agencies, the police, and mostly the NSCDS. So we build that relationship with them as soon as there is early warning signal or implication where we can tag our potential hotspots, we reach out to either commissioner in that community in order to deploy the necessary prevention technique to prevent any condition of election violence.
Your organisation has champion several political engagements as a strategy that promote transformative leadership, how do you measure this campaign for effective result?
So first importantly is to have a communication objectives in the first place, you have laid out your communication objectives and then your intervention, plans and strategy will revolve around achieving that objective.
You should also have an indicator in which you measure your success. And you need to make sure you monitor and actually evaluate your progress at different points in time. But two things are key here – One is when people make reference to your reports, and say, due to your reports, we took certain actions. Police for instance, say oh, we receive an early warning signal reports from Yiaga Africa. And because of that we deployed our men to the location; we’re able to quelled the potential violence, which measures as a success to us.
Another thing is when others are making analysis in reference to your findings (report). For instance, in Edo election in 2020. All we said was that at least 11 Local governments have potential hazard violence, and will report this to the Commissioner at that time because we have done advocacy visit earlier. That’s actually first raised tension, but it also made necessary stakeholders to take necessary action.
So in most cases, when the stakeholders make reference to what you’ve done, and then take action regarding that, and then of course, they will also campaigns around improving the electoral process or making certain decisions or passing certain laws.
The typical example is the 2022 Electoral Act that just passed most of the recommendations or key provisions of the Act were recommendations from election observation intervention that we did. These serve as achievements for electoral reform that informed the passage of the new Electoral Act and then the key provisions around the use of technology. Order things around funding of the commission, and issues related to that. So when you see your intervention when making reference to, you pushes the campaign and then it was successful.
Then remember that you cannot push all these campaigns without strategic publicity. Not just all about your social media or newspaper but reaching the right people at some point we had to do ‘Top 10 Citizen priority’ for electoral reform and then documented and submitted to all lawmakers both Senates and House of representatives members to their various offices at the National Assembly, telling them that this is what the citizens want as regard to our electoral amendments. Majority scaled while some don’t.
But of course, we are proud to say that these interventions is actually what is currently improving our electoral process.
