(Illustration by Ailadi)
Change is rarely straightforward. Those of us working in the social sector understand this, because we often work on complex and abstract issues like climate change, criminal justice, and migration. The problem of effectively communicating in the face of abstraction is no stranger to people working on innovation, and it presents a huge barrier to getting buy-in and support for new ideas. Many people associate innovation with gadgets, data science, and famous inventors like Steve Jobs, rather than viewing it as a tool that can build new ways of thinking. Indeed, the term is overused and, in many cases, meaningless.
Meanwhile, nonprofits and NGOs tend to communicate their own organizations’ values, rather than connect to the values of the audiences they want to engage. This, paired with abstract language, leaves audiences to fill in the blanks with their own assumptions and biases about what innovation is.
Two years ago, our communications about innovation at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) Innovation Service was packed with jargon, stereotypes, and meaningless statistics. We pushed out internal messages that everyone should innovate, confident that people could and would embrace humanitarian innovation as the next best thing. We told everyone why innovation is so important and so great.
Yet in our enthusiasm, we missed an opportunity to actually engage UNHCR staff in the work. The ultimate aim of the Innovation Service is to create an enabling environment for innovation to flourish within UNHCR—to equip staff with the knowledge, resources, and skills they need to use innovation as a tool to solve challenges. But while we may have been raising awareness about innovation, we weren’t helping our colleagues find new and better ways of working. We were working in abstraction when we should have been shaping intentional, deliberate, and meaningful communication.
So, in partnership with the University of Florida’s Center for Public Interest Communications, we began working out how to make staff members care about innovation, with the idea that if we could get more people to innovate within the organization and in collaboration with refugee communities, we’d have greater impact.
Together, we found the answer in an unlikely place: peer-reviewed academic research.
Simply put, peer-reviewed academic research is the most-effective tool that most social change organizations are not using. There are good reasons why. Most organizations don’t have resources to spare, and the scope and urgency of the challenges they face can easily overshadow the pragmatism of using academic research to drive strategy. Without librarians and researchers on a team to identify relevant research, ensure that it’s rooted in sound research practices, and find ways to apply it to daily efforts, it can seem overwhelming.
But it pays to do it. By relying on science that tells us how the human mind, behavior, and society work, we understand where our communications will have the most impact, and these insights are now helping us design effective communication for both internal and external audiences. Here’s a look at what we learned.
A Strategy for Communicating Complexity
We realized we were using insider language to describe innovation (as exemplified by internal blog post titles like “Using GIS Technology to Map Shelter Allocation in Azraq Refugee Camp”), rather than communicating what innovation looks like and the benefits it would bring to UNHCR staff (for example, “How UNHCR Used Creativity to Improve Journalistic Accuracy and Collaboration, One Step at a Time”). So, we hit the reset button and asked ourselves these four questions before crafting our internal communications strategy:
- What do we want to change? What do we want to be true that isn’t true right now?
- Whose behavior change is necessary to making that happen? Who has to do something (or stop doing something) they’re not doing now for us to achieve that goal? (This is about targeting a narrowly defined audience whose action or behavioral change is fundamental to your goal.)
- What would that individual or group believe if they took that action? In other words, what does that narrowly defined audience care about most, and how can we include that in our messages?
- How will we get that message in front of them? Where are their eyes?
This framework helped us move beyond thinking about innovation from our group’s distinct point of view, as well as dig into some of the beliefs and behaviors we wanted to change within the organization that supported new ways of working.
Following this exercise, we decided to focus on using social, behavioral, and cognitive science to gain new insight that helps the team:
- Ensure our work aligns with the science behind how people form beliefs and adopt new behaviors
- Build support for innovation within the organization
- More quickly transmit promising practices and bright spots to those who will benefit the most from them
- Embed skills and qualities associated with innovation throughout UNHCR and the humanitarian sector
Achieving these aims required that we shift from using communication solely as a means to disseminate organizational impact to building strategic, science-driven communication into work farther upstream.
Telling the Right Kind of Stories
Part of making this shift involved rethinking our storytelling. Research tells us that storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have for capturing attention, helping people absorb new perspectives, and reducing listeners’ inclination to disagree or find fault in your argument. But for it to work, stories must be stories. They need a narrative arc—a beginning, a middle, and an end; conflict and resolution; characters and setting. Otherwise, they are just messages or vignettes. Our editorial calendar was full of content—listicles, opinion pieces, and project updates—but not stories.
We also needed to fix the gender imbalance in the articles we were publishing, as our traditional innovation narrative was likely feeding into the very male and tech-centric stereotypes our team spoke out against. One article that documents the journey of three UNHCR staff members through the organization’s Innovation Fellowship, for example, included the voices of three people—all of them male. The article actively contributed to a narrative that excluded women innovators. It also fueled the assumptions of people who believed innovation was relevant to only a select few.
We began experimenting with a few new principles:
- Choose the emotions you activate with care. Stories that move people to action need to be intentional about the emotions they elicit. Anger reduces our ability to take the perspective of others or think about complex solutions. Fear makes us want to fight or run away. And we are more likely to act out of pride than guilt; feelings of pride and awe open us up to new ideas. We’ve thus moved away from using sadness as an emotion to anchor our communication and started framing our stories about UNHCR Innovation Service’s work in new ways we hope will inspire awe in our colleagues. Organizations should choose the stories they tell and the emotions they want people to feel with their strategic goals as a guide.
- Include actionable and meaningful calls to action. Rather than “sign our petition, “click here for more information,” and “follow us on social media,” organizations need to engage target groups and move them toward change. We’ve started including explicit calls to action in our stories—for example, building a story around a particular action as the moral of the story or including a call to action at the end of the story.
- Create room for people to tell their own stories. We’ve intentionally sought voices from refugee-led organizations to talk about what innovation looks like in practice, and we’ve expanded how we document promising practices from the field through investing in additional staff capacity to capture stories from UNHCR’s country operations. This shows that refugees and colleagues in the field are driving innovation throughout the organization—that innovation doesn’t just sit with our team.
- Capture attention through story. To change traditional narratives on innovation and motivate our advocates, we also share counter-narratives—stories that surprise, break common assumptions, and fill abstraction with understanding. To do this, we provide a platform for unnamed or missing voices to tell their stories, and thus create a more holistic and truthful narrative. For example, two young women drive the Innovation Service’s data and artificial intelligence work. We’ve shared their work and experiences to challenge the narrative that only men successfully pursue science and technology careers, as well as traditional ideas about what an innovator looks like in the humanitarian sector. The team also started working with an illustrator, Ailadi, to express complexity through visual arts; designing more compelling diagrams; and using photographs in surprising and curiosity-building ways.
Lessons on Applying Research to Practice
We soon learned that applying these story-building principles required much more time, effort, and collaboration than we anticipated. We started by experimenting with a set of stories on UNHCR’s first predictive analytics project—a computer that learns from past patterns to predict the displacement of persons in Somalia. Our challenge was to present stories on diverse topics—including failures behind the predictive analytics platform and the importance of data about goats—in a way that was accessible, included emotions with care, and followed a narrative arc. This type of strategic communication required that we diligently collaborate with groups outside our team, question our assumptions about what would resonate with our audience, and check our approach against the science.
We also learned that knowledge about science-based communication needed to spread beyond our team. Other teams—including ones focused on climate change, ethics, and human rights—wrestled with challenges related to communicating abstraction. We are now working with individual UNHCR teams to bring research-driven communication into their work. For example, the Innovation Service defined “communicating complexity” as a primary challenge for both the team and the larger organization, and worked alongside one of UNHCR’s innovation fellows to understand how research could support our work and to identify concrete barriers in communicating the complexity of climate change displacement internally.
Other insights drawn from behavioral and social science—such as avoiding muddling communications with technical terms and identifying where our interests and values intersect with those of our target community—have benefited many teams within UNHCR. While we started simply by asking how we could make innovation more relatable and accessible, we’ve since stumbled into a treasure trove of academic insights that are proving useful to our organization. Using peer-reviewed research is, in itself, an experiment for us, and we’ll continue to test it to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Reaching the Other Side of Complexity
There’s a lesser-known saying that goes, “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” In the context of large organizations, this means that while we may want to stay in the comfort zone of our expertise, we should strive to find and operate on the other side of complexity—to communicate meaningfully, concisely, and intentionally.
While innovation comes with a lot of baggage, academic research can help us think through its complexity and give us a pathway to doing it better. Our experience is a reminder that when we think about our work, complex doesn’t have to mean complicated.
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Read more stories by Annie Neimand, Lauren Parater, Hans Park & Ann Christiano.