Methodology

Professional consulting and training will be initially undertaken by an expatriate consultant (Stefano) who will gradually transfer the competences and hand over responsibilities to ONG employees.

A core group of professionals (not more than 15) will be identified by AKF.   They will be the future trainers as well as the experts within the NGOs in communication management in social programmes.  They will continue to attend their routinely duties within the implementation of NSP, but will focus on communication management as one important aspect of NSP implementation.

This core group will be subdivided into three teams. Each team will address specifically to one component of  communication management within the on-going programme of NSP (or another ongoing programme selected by AKF).

The three teams will address to three different components of communication management:

• Internal communication, amongst the components of the team, along the various phases of the programme activities workflow (from need assessment to impact evaluation) and along the hierarchical organogram.
• Communication with external stakeholders, that include the beneficiaries, the community representatives, the local government, the donors, etc.
• Institutional communication, that will deal with the communication from public institution to the citizens and to the civil society bodies, for consensus building and for a stakeholders participated approach to policy design, implementation and evaluation.

The expatriate communication consultant (Stefano) will guide these three groups and will assist them during their work.  Work will start with the analysis of the communication needs within the programme, then will define and implement a communication strategy and finally will evaluate the communication results obtained.

The activity of leadership of the local team will be conducted in such a manner that is at the same time a process of transfer of knowledge and competence. By sustaining communication management of some project components, Stefano will not be the one responsible for the implementation of the project tasks but will:

• support the persons responsible for the tasks,
• show all the tasks requirements,
• transfer the know how for satisfactory performance of the tasks.

On the other Stefano will make sure that the process of delivery of knowledge is done also to the whole organization and only to the individuals.  This can be dome by  sustaining the team using tools that can be collected and reutilized  by the organization . To this aim it is essential that consultancy will be given with an extensive usage of  written documents (checklists, templates, insight documents, guidelines, etc.) Example of deliverables are at the end of this document.

The process of transferring knowledge will be gradual. At the beginning Stefano will take leadership of the things that the present team is not yet capable of doing. Later he will be mainly concerned with transmitting the competences (by supporting the others in performing their roles, so that better results are achieved).  Finally the teams will not need any longer the presence of Stefano (even if  he will continue to generate added value to the activities, his presence would not be indispensable to the organization for achieving the communication objectives.