Newsletter #8 October

Communication is a vital tool for all public interest organizations, and we need to be strategic about how it is used to achieve impact. What do our messages say? How do the target communities interact with our messages? Do the target communities listen, take action, or ignore our message? The following resources can help us better understand how to create an effective message.

Meet GIA’s Communication Team

The GIA Communications Working Group’s mission is to ensure that our organization and partners are creating meaningful messages that motivate listeners to take action. GIA’s Communications Working Group includes Andrea Chavez, Ana Luiza Violato Espada, Carolina Jordao, Vanessa Luna Celino, and Dalena Nguyen. The team has worked together to build our web site, produce monthly newsletters, promote GIA via social media, and research the effectiveness of these messages. We are constantly striving to build on our strategies to help GIA and our partners meet our shared goals.

The Science of What Makes People Care

The Science of What Makes People Care by Ann Christiano and Annie Neimand shows us how we can evoke action. It is important to understand what compels people to invest their attention, emotion, and action. How can we motivate engagement, belief, and behavior change? The research highlighted by Christiano and Neimand outlines five principles.

1. Join the community

   • The target communities are more likely to engage and consume information that connects to their identities and aligns with their deeply held values.

2. Communicate in images

   • Do not create complex and abstract messages. Use visual language to help people connect to our work.

3. Invoke emotion with intention

   • Each type of emotion can lead people to different actions. When pleasant emotions are invoked, people become attracted to the issue.

4. Create meaningful calls to action

   • An effective call to action must be concrete and specific; the target community needs to see how their actions will help solve the issue; and the call to action must be something the target community has the ability to do.

5. Tell better stories 

   • Stories have the power to convey new perspectives. People are more likely to remember information they receive in narrative form. Through storytelling, we can lower counter-arguing, increase perspective-taking and empathy, and capture and maintain people’s attention.

Read the full article here

Stop Raising Awareness Already

Stop Raising Awareness Already, also by Ann Christiano and Annie Neimand, encourages social activists to go beyond providing information and raising awareness. We need to use behavioral science to craft campaigns that use messages and concrete calls to action that get the target communities to change how they feel, think, or act, and as a result create long-lasting change.We can go beyond raising awareness by:

1. Targeting our audience as narrowly as possible

   • Look at the individuals or groups whose action or behavior change will be most important to helping us achieve our goals.

2. Create compelling messages with clear calls to action

   • The message should resonate with the target communities and outline what they need to do.

3. Develop a theory of change

   • The theory of change includes a methodology for how we will achieve change that includes objectives, tactics, and evaluation.

4. Use the right messenger

   • The message should come from people who have authority and credibility according to the target communities.

Read the full article here

The Importance of Assessing Our Work: Learning to Improve

The GIA project is entering a very exciting stage as we are building upon the results of the activities we have developed so far to learn lessons that we can share with you over the coming months. Throughout GIA‘s life, and particularly after specific activities such as trainings, webinars, and workshops, we have requested your input through surveys to help us guide our detailed agendas and improve project implementation.

Our motivation to keep you engaged in this way is to document whether and how GIA has contributed to your own work and professional development and in turn, to bring your ideas to help shape our own GIA agenda. In this way we aim to effectively learn and continue consolidation of GIA’s Community of Practice and Learning (CoP-L) to more decisively address threats to infrastructure governance.

We are once more reaching out to learn how our communication strategy is performing for you. We will be grateful once more for your continued engagement and invite you to fill up this short survey at this link: https://ufl.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eFgrvTxy1Rb8xql. We know filling up these surveys takes up time and for that, we are grateful for your input so far and say again, thanks!

If you want to learn more regarding our work on documenting learning and change associated to GIA’s implementation, please visit the Knowledge Exchange page of our website and read GIA’s Newsletter #6 here.

Please help us by answering our survey, before Nov. 10, here

UAP Thesis Students Carry Out Fieldwork in Bolivia

Between September 28 and October 16, 2020, a group of undergraduate students from the Amazon University of Pando traveled to the town of Cachuela Esperanza, Bolivia where they began their fieldwork on social, environmental, and legal issues. The common denominator of all the research was the impacts of the Jirao and Santo Antonio hydroelectric plants on the communities near the border with Brazil. The communities involved in the different studies were: Cachuela Esperanza, Cachuela Mamoré, Villa Bella, Puerto Consuelo I and Puerto Consuelo II. The students had the important support of the Community Organization of Amazonian Women (OCMA), and the renowned biologist Dennis Lizarro of the Aquatic Resources Research Center of the Autonomous University of Beni, in addition to the collaboration of the fishermen of Cachuela Esperanza.

Knowledge Exchange Workshop in Bolivia

On October 5 and 6, the “Knowledge Exchange Workshop” was held in the community of Cachuela Esperanza, Bolivia, organized by the Community Organization of Amazonian Women (OCMA) and GIA, with the help of the Autonomous University of Beni and the Amazon University of Pando. The workshop was attended by representatives of Cachuela Esperanza, Cachuela Mamoré, Barranco Colorado, Primero de Mayo, Puerto Consuelo II and institutions from Guayaramerín as well as collaborators from Riberalta. The objective of the workshop was to generate an exchange of experiences on the impacts of the construction of the Jirau and Santo Antonio dams on the livelihoods of the populations and especially the fishermen living in the Alto Madera basin (Mamoré river and Beni river) and open dialogue to propose short and long-term solutions. At the end of the workshop, proposed actions to build resilience and a work plan were prepared, including support on the issues of fishing legalization and prior consultation.

Upcoming Webinar:
Women and Energy: Discussion and Reflections

GIA is excited to host and invite you to our next webinar, Women and Energy: Discussion and Reflections. The webinar will be in Spanish and will take place on Friday, October 30 at 3:00 p.m. (EST). The webinar will be led by Silvia Molina Carpio, a Civil Engineer and Researcher at Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral y Agrario (CEDLA). We will discuss the problems of women and energy, emphasizing the structure of the extractive sector and the challenges to face inequalities of power.

Webinar Recap:
Tracks, Trampolines and White Elephants: Discourse Policies of Infrastructure in the Colombian Amazon

Simon Uribe, professor of the Urban Management and Development program at the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia, spoke about the practices and processes of state building in the Colombian Amazon through roads and highways. At different times, this infrastructure has been synonymous with land grabbing, racial violence, dispossession, deforestation and extraction, and decimation of traditional indigenous populations, which still demand respect for their ancestral territories and ways of life. In turn, they have been a central part of the historical and current demands by peasant and urban settlers for connectivity and integration with other departments and regions of the country.

You can access the recorded presentation here