This free online learning course aims to raise awareness about the key components of effective communication with crisis-affected communities, and to build knowledge and skills on how to communicate in practice. Provided that Results-Based Protection is rooted in starting from the perspective of affected people regarding identifying and determining how to respond to a protection issue, effective and two-way dialogue with communities helps to create a foundation that supports overall protective results.
The course introduces learners to the key concepts in Communicating with Communities in humanitarian emergencies and features interactive, scenario-based challenges to allow learners to practice what they have learned for establishing meaningful communication in a rapid-onset natural disaster or conflict situation.
Key learning objectives include:
- Understand how communication can be used to support disaster-affected people and programme objectives;
- Understand how to assess the information needs of the community and decide through which channel(s) of communication to reach them;
- Understand how to create and adapt information and messages to maximise impact;
- Understand how to develop a communications strategy (using multiple channels) to establish and maintain two-way communication; and
- Understand how to manage and respond to feedback from the community.
Communicating with Communities puts the affected population’s need for information and the importance of playing a leading role in their own recovery at the center of the conversation, making engagement, information provision, and communication, as all part of the same process. Effective information dissemination and listening carefully to feedback also allows implementing organizations to identify misunderstanding, build trust and overcome perception biases, and detect important gaps in the response – facilitating improved decision-making and more appropriate and relevant responses.
To access this e-course, please see here.