Increasing communications capacity is a priority for most international NGOs. At Malaria Consortium, we wanted to increase our capacity in order to inform and engage people in support of on-going malaria efforts worldwide. For us, this means communicating key learning and evidence from our work on the ground to a wide range of audiences.

As a fast-growing international NGO, we recognised that increasing our outputs and reach needed to be a priority for us, if we wanted our external communications and advocacy activities to have impact.

As part of a series of capacity building activities we spent several months developing a communications toolkit to support staff gathering materials for external communication purposes (you can download it here:

http://www.malariaconsortium.org/media-library/search/id-116). We identified three key areas where the toolkit might offer support: gathering information, capturing good photographs and writing up work or producing case studies. The toolkit provides simple guidelines for staff who may have little or no comms training but want to undertake an interview, or write up a case study. As a relatively young organisation, Malaria Consortium does not have established communications and advocacy teams in all of its country offices, so a single comms guide for use across the organisation is a good support tool which helps reinforce our key strategic communications objectives.

The toolkit is also available in Portuguese - Guiao de Comunicacao no Campo

http://www.malariaconsortium.org/media-library/

Please share the toolkit with partners and stakeholders if you feel it would a valuable resource.

Michelle Davis,

Communications Manager, Malaria Consortium

Michelle Davis is a communications specialist, with over 10 years’ experience directing documentaries and factual programmes for the BBC. Having previously ran the Communications Department at Muslim Aid, she is currently Communications Manager with Malaria Consortium.

Malaria Consortium is one of the world's leading non-profit organisations dedicated to the comprehensive control of malaria and other communicable diseases in Africa and Southeast Asia.

www.malariaconsortium.org

www.twitter.com/fightingmalaria

www.facebook.com/malariaconsortium

www.youtube.com/user/malariaconsortiumuk