Mondo's volunteers in Uganda: Communication is not for everyone!

"The definition of an expert is someone who knows what not to do" [Charles Willson].

I have been working in communication for more than 10 years. Communicating is something we do on a daily basis. We talk, we use our body language, we write, we use social media, we sing, we draw to transmit messages to family members, business partners, and friends.

A cobbler should stick to his last

But just because we communicate in our private life, doesn't mean we are qualified to do so in a professional context.
Unfortunately, I have met many people in my career that felt qualified to do social media marketing, just because they have a Facebook Account or build a Newsletter just because they know how to send emails.
But like Charles Willson said: it is not always about knowing what to do, but also what not to do.

There are a lot of stumbling blocks in communication. In the worst-case, there can be severe legal consequences. GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), Privacy Policies, Imprint, Consent Forms for the use of pictures, etc. are things that need to be taken into consideration

Organizations don't own their communication

While in Uganda, I noticed that many organizations don't have the necessary knowledge in Marketing/ Communication and leave it many times to inexperienced volunteers.

As a result, many organizations have multiple websites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and other social media channels, they are not even aware of. Of course, hardly anything is maintained properly. Volunteers come, create and leave. They neither share their knowledge nor passwords.

Let's fix it!

Defining target groups

When I started working, I spend a good amount of time closing accounts, deleting websites, trying to regain passwords. Unfortunately, I did not manage in every case. For some pages, it was impossible to find out who set things up and there was no way to go.

But it was not only about cleaning. Organizations need to be able to manage their own communication and not depend on volunteers.
Therefore we built a proper communication strategy to communicate in a target-oriented way. We spent a lot of time identifying and describing target groups. The result of the 5-month work was a budget sheet and a clear action plan with systematic communication measures for each month.

I also spent afternoons training staff to maintain the website, use canva to create designs and explained Facebook to be able to regularly publish on social media.

It was small steps we did, but the biggest goal was to make everyone understand how important ownership is. I left the organizations with a good feeling and am now curious to see everyone communicating, even from the distance.