Watch in full: Belinda Goldsmith, Thomson Reuters Foundation

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It’s time for the media to shine a light on the world’s most vulnerable communities as they fight this pandemic

Image: Mercy Corps adapting its humanitarian aid programming, like this registration for emergency cash distribution in the DRC, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

By Douglas Alexander, Christina Lamb, Simon O’Connell, Ed Williams, Ceri Thomas and Anne-Marie Tomchak

It is understandable how in these complex and challenging times, as we’re asked to socially distance and self-isolate, that there’s a tendency to look inwards. However, now more than ever, we should be connecting with others around the world who are also facing the same threat. The COVID-19 pandemic transcends borders, it is a global crisis and if we are to overcome it, the solutions have to be local, global and collective. 

Journalists and media outlets in the UK are already playing an important role in providing vital information to an anxious public. In the months ahead they will also have a key role to play in finding and communicating these solutions, and in telling our shared stories. 

While it’s understandable that we are all worried about our own families, communities and countries in these difficult times, we know from our experience that people in fragile and conflict-affected places will be disproportionally affected by this virus. Vulnerable communities around the world already experiencing humanitarian need due to violence, poverty, food insecurity and extreme weather are more susceptible and for many, COVID-19 is just the latest in a long line of emergencies threatening their families, their lives and their livelihoods.

Media coverage of coronavirus needs to expand beyond domestic news

At a time when people are crying out for social connection, when we are seeing news consumption levels rise exponentially, with almost half of the population saying they are watching more television and one-third reading more newspaper content, there’s now a great need for coverage to expand beyond domestic news, share knowledge and connect the local with the global like never before.  For a country as outward-looking and internationalist as the UK, there’s a responsibility on all of our media outlets and news correspondents to step up and recognise the importance of better international coverage in the weeks ahead.

We welcome the BBC’s (the most trusted brand on the coronavirus) new Africa tracker, launched last week and the Independent’s coverage of an Imperial College report looking at the potential impact on lower-income countries. Can we have more of these?

The world is facing a never-before-seen event on a global scale. Younger people are becoming more engaged with media, with a 60% increase in streaming among people aged 18 to 24 and a 49% increase in live TV viewing. It is our responsibility to provide them with the full global picture, and the harsh reality is that this pandemic is going to hit other, more fragile countries much, much harder.

Let’s celebrate some of the stories of heroic efforts being made around the world

As we rightly see the celebration of so many of our local heroes and inspiring stories of community spirit and volunteerism, there are also incredible stories of people in places like Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan who are adapting quickly in the face of huge constraints to ensure people have the urgent supplies they need.  Health, water and sanitation teams pivoting to protect communities against COVID-19, examples of social distancing in refugee camps, and innovative remote management of ongoing emergency distributions.

As well as informing and awareness-raising, the media can also play a crucial role in demonstrating our inter-connectedness and global responsibilities – which include reminding the UK Government of its ongoing commitment to help vulnerable communities around the world, upholding the values of humanity and compassion, and showing us that we are more dependent on each other than ever before.

Our message to the UK media

To the UK media, we ask: help us shine a light on the most vulnerable communities battling this outbreak, partner with us to tell the stories that connect us all – of teams striving to respond to the world’s greatest needs in some of the world’s most challenging places and against all odds, and support us to share solutions, so that together we can beat this, for everyone.

Douglas Alexander, Former Secretary of State for International Development
Christina Lamb, Sunday Times Chief Foreign Correspondent
Simon O’Connell, Executive Director for Mercy Corps
Ceri Thomas, Tortoise News 
Anne-Marie Tomchak, Journalist and broadcaster
Ed Williams, President and CEO of Edelman EMEA

Douglas, Christina, Ceri, Anne-Marie and Ed are all members of Mercy Corps’ European Leadership Council

Briefing Notes: Thomson Reuters Foundation

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How Islamic Relief is using a gaming app to reach young audiences

Last October Islamic Relief UK launched an innovative gaming app, Virtue Reality. Its aim was to inform young people about how aid works and to tackle prejudice against Muslims. Judith Escribano, Head of Communications at Islamic Relief UK, explains the story behind Virtue Reality.

A couple of years ago, Mark Galloway, Director of IBT, asked me what my boys watched on television. ‘Nothing’, I replied. His eyes nearly popped out of his head! I told him that they and most of their friends just watch YouTube videos and play online games on their phones.

And that set me thinking. How could we, as the communications department of a charity, reach young people if they weren’t watching television or reading papers? And when algorithms mean they may not be seeing the social media posts we want them to see?

At the same time, I was reading Shelina Janmohamed’s book Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World. And I discovered that young British Muslims either felt that they were not represented in films, TV programmes or video games; or when they were, they saw themselves represented as terrorists (if male) or weak and oppressed (if female). And I thought about the impact that must have on the psyche of a young British Muslim.

I wondered if we could produce a video game app as a means of reaching young British Muslims and as a way to communicate Islamic Relief UK’s two key messages: aid works, and Muslims are inspired by their faith to donate to charity and to do good in the world. Could this also be a way of tackling widespread islamophobia in the media?

We didn’t want our game to be preachy

Since we’d never done anything like this before, we didn’t know whether it would work, let alone how successful it would be. But the CEO of Islamic Relief Worldwide took a risk and allowed me to go ahead with the game without demanding any KPIs. A huge relief! We found a brilliant developer in Shahid Ahmad, the Managing Director of Ultimatum Games. As a Muslim, he had suffered Islamophobia and tokenism both in the gaming sector and society at large. He could bring his own experiences and passion to the project. But he also knew how to create compelling games. This was important to us because we didn’t want our game to be preachy. We wanted people to enjoy playing it, to share it, to talk about it. And to feel good about seeing people like themselves in it.

Shahid’s wealth of experience meant that he could create a game that was both informative AND fun. Starting with a microdam in Mali, players work their way through real-life projects run by Islamic Relief UK, hiring staff of different genders, ethnicities and appearances and earning ‘deed coins’ for their work. Once a certain amount of money is earned on a project, it is upgraded to different levels and once these levels are maxed out, new projects open up.

We rolled out Virtue Reality at Sheffield’s National Videogame Museum during Charity Week – a crucial fundraising initiative for Islamic Relief run by Islamic Student Societies at universities across the country. We invited local schools to come along and try out the game. And my media team targeted a range of media, recognising that this story straddles many themes: children’s; education; faith; BME; technology; charity; international development; local; and even mainstream news.

A still from Islamic Relief’s mobile game Virtue Reality

Broadcasters were keen to cover the launch

One of the reasons we had such success with media is that we made the launch visually attractive for broadcasters. Over an hour at the event was dedicated to children playing the game and being interviewed by journalists as they played. The BBC, Sky’s children’s programme FYI and the Islam Channel all attended and broadcast footage. We also prepared spokespeople for different specialities on the day: Shahid from the tech perspective; our Head of Programmes to talk about in-country work; our Head of Fundraising to talk about Charity Week. And myself to talk about where the idea came from. Having so much to offer meant we could give our diverse media exactly what they wanted.

The media interest validated the product. Editors who were quiet at first started warming up again a week after the launch event, having seen coverage on the BBC News website and across charity sector media. And the more the game was shared via external links online, the more it was shared on social media by influencers like Shuhei Yoshida (Sony’s President of Worldwide Studios), and Melissa Fleming, Director of Global Communications at the UN. Many communications professionals will be familiar with that domino effect of attention on your campaign or message. That was the case with Virtue Reality.

So far we have had coverage in over 50 outlets – and are still fielding interview requests three months after launch. It has been downloaded over 5,000 times and currently has a 5 star rating on the appstore and 4.8 star rating on Google PlayStore. And Virtue Reality’s journey is far from over. It has now been launched by our offices in Malaysia and Germany, and this year, offices in Canada, the US and Australia will introduce it to their markets.

Check it out for yourselves by downloading the app for free on the appstore or Google PlayStore. Tell us what you think!

Judith Escribano is Head of Communications at Islamic Relief UK

Meet the editor: LADbible’s Joe Elsworth on how to engage young audiences

We recently invited Joe Elsworth, Account Director at LADbible to join us for an IBT member briefing. He manages LADbible’s relationships with government and the charity sector, working on branded content partnerships across LADbible Group’s range of channels and platforms. Joe spoke to us about their social strategy, how LADbible Group has evolved from a solitary Facebook page to one of the biggest youth media publishers in the world, and how they are successfully engaging with young audiences.

Following on from their award winning campaign, Trash Isles, LADBible now work regularly with some of the biggest global brands and campaign for good causes. Over the past year they’ve worked with the Army, the Home Office, RNLI, Amnesty International and many more. Joe shared some of their most successful campaigns, why they have worked on social, and how to affect behavioural change in young people or make them feel passionately about an issue.

“Every time we post something we try to think if it’s something that we would want to talk about down the pub.”

Joe shared insights into how LADbible choose the topics and content that will appeal to their audience, and feel relevant to them. He explained that they spend a lot of time looking at the comments on videos to stay close to their audience, using their 700,000 daily comments to identify key themes and trends.

“The first 5 to 10 seconds is crucial in social video. You’re fighting against people’s thumb scrolling.”

He also share his tips for optimising video content for each social media platform, highlighting the importance of keeping on top of the latest changes in algorithms and best practices.

To finish off the session, IBT members from Practical Action, Christian Aid and ONE Campaign had an opportunity to ask questions on how they can utilise their social video platforms to better engage wider audiences.

Find out more in our ‘Meet the Editor’ interview below. Registered IBT Members can find the full briefing notes and LADbible contact information here.

Briefing Notes: Brand activism with Mark Iremonger

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Your Monthly Briefing • March 2020

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Briefing Notes: LADBible

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New ways of telling stories

We recently launched our new report Podcasts: where next? In the audience was Catherine Raynor, co-founder of Mile 91, a storytelling agency for charities and changemakers that provides both production and training services. She was previously Head of Media at VSO and during that time was a Trustee of IBT. We asked Catherine to give us her key takeaways from the report.

If someone told you there was a way to tell stories that didn’t mean squeezing everything into two minutes, was possible to produce on a low budget and that would result in more than half your audience researching more about what they’d learnt, would you be interested in knowing what that was? I assume your answer is yes.

These are just some of the things I learnt at the launch of Podcasts: where next? I think we’ve all been to events where we come out with a freshly clear inbox and a report that eventually finds its way into the recycling. This is not one of them and I would really encourage any charity storyteller, regardless of whether you work for an international organisation, to read this report because it is packed full of really fascinating insight and practical advice that is transferable to any sector.

The panel event, hosted by Channel 4 and chaired by Krishnam Guru-Murthy, was a rich, varied and at times funny conversation. Here are my top ten takeaways:

1. The market is booming

In 2019 one in eight adults listened to a podcast at least once a week, double the number just five years earlier. But the stat that blew my mind is that in the 15-24 age group podcast downloads surpassed music downloads for the first time in 2019. For charities desperately trying to reach younger audiences this is massive news.

2. They’re the most engaged audiences in town

68% of audiences listen to the entire episode they’ve downloaded and with 91% listening alone you really do have a captive audience. 67% of listeners go on to discuss a topic with family and friends and 52% will research more about the topic.

3. Longer is better

In an era when a three minute film is the ‘long’ version and an in-depth written story tops out at about 500 words, podcasts are almost inconceivably luxurious in the opportunity they offer. But 20 minutes is seen as the best digestible length.

4. You can be nuanced

The longer length means you can explore an issue or a story in more length, unpicking back stories and discussing the complexities of an issue. People who listen to podcasts are an interested audience who are actively seeking information so give it to them

5. Don’t be boring

Actively seeking information is not an invitation to be lectured to. Podcasts are still entertainment, so find creative ways to broach your issues. One of the panellists, Sarah King, was from the Institute of Development Studies and their podcast is called Between the Lines which follows the book group model, centring each episode on a different book.

6. Ditch your talking heads

Podcasts are not the place for clipped rehearsed soundbites. We’ve all turned off the radio when a slick overly trained spokesperson is spouting key messages and that’s just a one minute interview. Podcasts are intimate experiences and need engaging and authentic voices who will talk freely and openly.

7. Podcasts are good for sex

A comment that got a ripple of laughter from the audience, but the point was serious: podcasts allow you to liberate issues and conversations that may not work for radio or the TV sofa shows.

8. Commitment is needed

Chucking out one podcast and expecting it to be a success is not going to work. Commitment and consistency is needed and you have to invest time in discoverability. Whether you go for an interview, round table discussion or narrative format, it will take time to grow your audience so you need to commit to a series or a regular pattern of new episodes.

9. Content is evergreen

Although it will take time to build your audience old episodes will always be there (if you want them to be) and so, when you capture new audiences, they will be able to rummage around in your archives.

10. They are not expensive

Podcasts do not need to be big budget endeavours. Taking your audiences to communities and countries they may not otherwise visit is an opportunity but it is not the only way. With the right voices you can produce perfectly good podcasts in a quiet room and with a good quality microphone.

These are just some of my takeaways but the report is full of lots more interesting insight plus advice on hosting platforms and how to pitch stories to existing podcast. Do have a read.

Your Monthly Briefing • February 2020

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How Save the Children helped rescue British children trapped in Syria

Last Autumn, Save the Children launched a successful campaign to bring the so called ‘ISIS children’ back to the UK. This group of orphans was stranded in an area of Syria previously controlled by ISIS. Media coverage played an important role in the success of the campaign as Dan Stewart, media manager at Save the Children explains.

Save the Children supporters recently helped transform the lives of a group of British children caught up in horrors far beyond their control.

The Government announced they were bringing home some of the innocent, British orphans who had been stranded in appalling conditions in overcrowded camps in northeast Syria after fleeing areas that had been under the control of ISIS.

Their short lives have been full of violence and fear but this brilliant news means these children have the precious chance to recover, have happy childhoods and live full lives. All children deserve that chance. And for the British children among them we can make it happen by bringing them to the UK.

This didn’t just happen on its own. It has taken a huge effort to get to this point and Save the Children campaigners have played an absolutely integral role. They spoke out in their thousands and our Government listened.

More than 10,000 campaigners emailed the Government calling on them to bring home all British children stranded in north-east Syria.These messages were sent in just five days, as support surged.

Media coverage

The campaign was given a boost when the BBC found three British orphans in a camp – stranded and in danger. Conditions for British children were now on the agenda but we were worried attention would die away before pressure built enough to make a difference. It was important for Save the Children to use our position as one of the few NGOs working in the northeast to keep the story going.

Fighting then came dangerously close to the British orphans’ camp. Hundreds of women and children fled and chaos reigned. But through our contacts Save the Children was able to confirm that the British orphans had been taken to safety nearby location, though they weren’t in our care.

Later, we were able to reveal that altogether there were more than 60 British children trapped in the area. This key part of the picture – previously unknown – generated widespread coverage in the media and helped decision-makers understand the scale of the issue.

All of this helped keep the issue high on the news and political agenda. Other voices joined in. Supportive articles in places like the Guardian and the Times soon followed.

Then we took our campaign direct to those in power. Save the Children projected ‘Don’t leave British children trapped in Syria’ onto the Houses of Parliament the evening before parliament dissolved for the election campaign. We sent a 50 sq m message that children’s lives cannot be left at risk for months in dangerous, freezing limbo while the election unfolds.

Impact

We started seeing positive signs coming from the corridors of power and the Government shifted position. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said for the first time that he thought ‘innocents should not be caught in the crossfire’ and he would look at whether British and orphans could be given safe passage to the UK. MPs from all parties spoke out in support and the Government acknowledged a duty of care to the British children in North East Syria. These are the building blocks of real change.

Everywhere we work has one thing in common: children are incredible. They want to play and learn, and just be children again. And they want to grow up to be doctors, teachers and football players. With the right care they can bounce back, recover and amaze us. They just need the chance. These children are no different, no matter what they’ve been dragged into by the decisions of adults.

By starting to bring these children home the Government showed they are prepared to do what’s right and stand up for children – even when it’s difficult. But this has to be only the start.

There are still as many as 60 British children that remain stranded in appalling conditions and Syria’s harsh winter will soon begin to bite. All are as innocent as those who have been rescued and our very real fear is that they won’t all survive to see the spring.

Everyone who helped bring these first children home should be incredibly proud, from campaigners making their voices heard to those working tirelessly behind the scenes. Every child saved is a triumph of compassion in the face of cruelty. Now it’s time to finish the job. They must all be brought home before it is too late.

Find out more about Save the Children’s campaign

If your organisation is interested in becoming a member of IBT, please get in touch here.

How Plan created the period emoji

In October 2019, a new period emoji made its way onto mobile phones all over the world. Designed by the team at Plan International UK, the emoji hopes to open up the conversation around menstruation and period poverty. We asked Laura MacLeman, Press and Media Manager at Plan International UK to give us a behind the scenes look at the campaign.

Q: How did you conceive and develop the idea for the Period Emoji campaign?

Back in 2017, the idea came up in a creative brainstorm. We knew we had a series of PR moments coming up focusing on reproductive health and rights, starting with Menstrual Hygiene Day in May. We’d also just started to build our work on girls’ rights here in the UK and we were looking for ideas that bridged the gap between our global and domestic work. The emoji felt like a creative, relevant and low-cost way to talk about the sometimes difficult topic of menstruation, and something that could have a tangible impact. We carried out a survey which found that almost half of women aged 18-34 believed that a period emoji would make it easier to discuss periods with friends and partners. That seemed like reason enough to try and make it a reality.

Q: What was involved in bringing the idea to life? Can you describe the process of creating an emoji?

The best word I can use for the process is long! Our Digital team did a lot of research before the campaign, so we knew we had to show the Unicode Consortium – who decide which emojis to take forward – that there was a significant public interest in this emoji being approved, and that nothing else existed that could stand in its place.

We did this by getting our supporters involved from the outset. Our in-house designer created various emojis and we asked the public to vote for their favourite. We had over 55,000 votes, so we knew we were on to something.

Unfortunately, the ‘period pants’ design that was originally chosen was rejected by Unicode and we were advised that we were more likely to be successful if the emoji had multiple uses. So we teamed up with NHS Blood to resubmit the successful blood drop emoji (the runner-up in the public vote).

Q: Did you have a specific target audience in mind for this campaign?

We wanted to get as many people on board as possible to show Unicode that there was a real need for the emoji. But we also knew it would resonate most with a younger female audience – which is slightly different to our existing supporter base – so we adjusted our communications accordingly. Our main media targets were places like Marie Claire, Grazia and Stylist – outwardly feminist titles read by our primary target audience. We also did some paid Facebook activity targeting younger women.

Q: How did you plan your media and communications to sustain engagement with the public throughout the campaign?

We knew that if we could get campaigners and journalists on side from the beginning, they would want to follow this story through to the end no matter what the outcome. If we hadn’t got the emoji that would have been a story in itself – why have emojis for unicorns, wizards and at least three different types of trains been approved, but not one for periods?!

Our campaign on period stigma has also been a lot wider than the emoji. In the past two years we’ve released the only representative statistics on girls facing period poverty in the UK, written a first-of-its-kind report, Break the Barriers, looking at period poverty and stigma in the UK and how this is linked to period poverty globally, and our Let’s Talk. Period. programme with sexual health and wellbeing charity, Brook, which has supported a huge number of girls across the UK.

Building up our expertise in this area has meant we’re consistently quoted in media stories and have become a go-to voice on periods.

Q: How has the media responded? Why do you think this is?

The media reaction to the arrival of the period emoji has been incredible, and we’ve had coverage everywhere from the Sun to Vogue. We really targeted technology reporters and women’s interest press, both of whom had a specific interest in the emoji, and the majority of coverage has been really positive and supportive.

There has definitely been a step change in the past two or three years around reporting about menstruation, though. When we first launched the campaign in early 2017, members of my team remember it being a really hard sell, with journalists literally laughing down the phone. So much has changed in that time – period poverty in the UK, and the stigma that contributes to this, has been highlighted as a real issue by individuals and organisations including Plan International UK, so I think by the time we were successful in getting the emoji the need for it was much more widely accepted.

Q: What were some of the challenges you faced during this campaign?

Unicode don’t share a lot of information on their decision-making process, so we never knew the timelines they were working to. We found out that the emoji was on keyboards when a member of staff happened to download their IOS update! That made communications tricky, as we had to be nimble and reactive rather than being able to plan in advance. We had to get as much ready to go as possible, and then just work like mad to get it all out there.

Q: How have you measured the impact of the campaign?

The main objective of all Plan International UK’s campaigns is to create actual change for girls, so the approval of the emoji and it now being available to use globally is the most tangible measure of success, and the one we’re most proud of.

We aimed to create this change – and open up the conversation around periods at the same time – through media coverage and digital engagement, and had measurable KPIs. We were aiming for a social media reach of 2 million (with 2,000 engagements across all channels), 500 solidarity votes on which emoji to put forward, and a modest 20 media clippings (as previously mentioned, the media environment wasn’t as period-friendly then as it is now).

The campaign completely outperformed these targets; from the activity surrounding the approval of the emoji in February 2019 alone we had 295 pieces of UK media coverage (and many more globally), our social media posts reached 4 million people with 8,500 engagements and drove 30,000 visits to our website – all at no cost.

It’s also been really interesting to see that the emoji has resonated across countries, and our colleagues in other Plan offices have been able to get real cut-through in their media landscapes too – from the Netherlands to Australia and even the government-run channels in China! So in that sense it’s been a truly global campaign.

Find out more about Plan’s Period Emoji Campaign

If your organisation is interested in becoming a member of IBT, please get in touch here.

Your Monthly Briefing • January 2020

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Global Britain after Brexit

It’s time for the media to stop focusing on Brexit and look more closely at the UK’s global role. The general election is a great opportunity for the international development community to highlight UK soft power as the sector makes the case for retaining 0.7% and the importance of a separate Department for International Development.

By Nasim Salad, UK Policy & Advocacy Coordinator, ONE

In the last 3 years, Brexit has dominated not only UK foreign policy, but also media coverage in general. As such, the role of Britain’s global influence has received few column inches despite our soft power being amongst the best in the world.

Britain is currently ranked as 2^nd in the Soft Power Index. From our world class universities and lifesaving scientific research, to our internationally renowned entertainers and artists, Britain’s global influence across academia, science and culture is well documented. Yet, Britain’s commitment to international development, one of the most prominent contributors to our world-class soft power, is all too often omitted.

Whilst the British press enjoys lauding our international pre-eminence in areas such as sport or science, the global recognition and respect for the UK on its development assistance is rarely covered. Many people are often surprised that the UK is admired for its international development achievements.

During the general election, this positive narrative should be conveyed more strongly across platforms, to inform the public of not just the incredible work that UK aid achieves, but to also celebrate that our development efforts are applauded globally.

Maintain 0.7%

Former Secretary of State for International Development, Rt Hon Andrew Mitchell, once described the UK as a “development superpower”. The UK commits to spend 0.7% of its national income on aid, the only major economy to do so. The Overseas Development Institute has said it is necessary for every donor country to reach this target to end extreme poverty. This commitment is recognised internationally; a British Council survey of 20,000 young people from across the G20 nations showed that support for global development was the greatest driver of trust in the UK.

Retain a separate DFID

Britain’s development efforts are highly regarded. The Department for International Development (DFID), the main Government department delivering UK aid, is frequently ranked as one of the best development agencies in the world for its effectiveness and its transparency. UK aid has a remarkable impact on some of the poorest people in the world. In just 4 years, UK aid has reached 32 million people with humanitarian aid, helped 56 million children to be immunised, and supported 14 million children to gain a decent education. The British public understand that their generosity is helping to alleviate poverty. Recent polling suggests that 89% of UK respondents believe that helping people in developing countries is important.

At a time of political instability and rising populism, it is vital that Britain remains outward looking. This means ensuring that we retain an independent Department for International Development. In their Soft Power Index report, the authors at Portland Communications remark on recent rumours about departmental mergers, suggesting that such a merger would;  “Send a signal that the UK cares less about global development than it once did. The resulting impact on Britain’s soft power is unlikely to be positive.”

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and DFID are both experts in their respective fields. DFID lifts people out of poverty by educating children and vaccinating young mothers. The FCO exerts Britain’s diplomatic prowess in the world’s most difficult regions. Combining the functions of the departments risks blurring their respective objectives and damaging our international reputation just when we need it most.

2020 is a make or break year, Britain has many opportunities to enhance its soft power. It will be hosting the UK-Africa Investment Summit, the COP 26 (UN Climate Change Conference), and the Replenishment Conference for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. These summits offer major opportunities to enhance this global presence, and to lead efforts to promote sustainable economic growth in Africa, tackle climate change, and end preventable disease.

Maintaining the 0.7% commitment and accelerating efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals will be key to preserving our hard-earned global reputation. Now, more than ever, the British media need to be cheerleaders for our soft power.

Briefing Notes: Guardian Head of Photography

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Your Monthly Briefing • December 2019

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Briefing Notes: Al Jazeera

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Your Monthly Briefing • November 2020

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How Oxfam made sustainable fashion mainstream news

Oxfam’s Second Hand September was one of its most successful campaigns, tapping into a public appetite, particularly amongst shoppers, to reduce their carbon footprint. What made the campaign so successful?

We asked Cordelia Kretzschmar, Head of Public Relations and Emma Fabian, Senior PR Press Officer at Oxfam GB to give us a behind the scenes look at the campaign.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for the campaign?

Cordelia: As the rest of the world has become more and more interested in the sustainable fashion story, we’ve found that it offers a rare opportunity for us to join up a number of things that Oxfam stands for. It really goes straight to the heart of what we do. Because if you buy second hand clothing from Oxfam all of the profits go towards the planet and the world’s poorest people. So it’s a double whammy for us. It felt like a really authentic and joined up campaign.

Emma: The actual idea was thought up by an individual in Oxfam, and then that was accepted by the organisation as the campaign that we would be running in the Summer.

C: We wanted to reach consumers and speak to them about something simple they can do so that they feel empowered about being able to do something about climate change. It also gave us an opportunity to talk about the wider issues around climate change. Because it often feels like such a huge problem, people get a bit paralysed about it. So we took that as a starting point and went from there.

Q: How did you plan your media campaign for maximum impact?

C: We knew that our job over the Summer was to get as much coverage as possible so that lots of people signed up to take the pledge. It was a crucial time period, so it was a bit of a no brainer to use our long-standing relationship with Glastonbury to launch the campaign. We were fortunate to get the headline acts of the festival to donate their stage outfits to us. So we had a team of people running around the backstage dressing rooms, and full support of the festival to make that happen. And the bands were amazing! We ended up with some incredible items, including Kylie Minogue’s sun visor! That story just got absolutely phenomenal coverage. It went around the world. So because of that celebrity buy in we launched the campaign really nicely at Glastonbury. It was part of a sequence of stories we mapped out to take us right from June through to the very beginning of September.

E: We commissioned a survey and conducted research showing that people got a lot of satisfaction from buying second hand. That generated a news story. Then later in the Summer we had a celebrity fashion shoot with Stella Tennant and her daughter, where they were wearing Oxfam clothes. We did a lot of work pitching that into the media, getting some definite features placed with the FT, Grazia and The Guardian before we did the shoot. Then afterwards, there was amazing coverage of that shoot. I suppose what both those things echo is that we’re using relationships that we’ve made over a long period of time; with Glastonbury and the relationships we’ve made in the fashion world. Which meant we had these influential voices speaking on Oxfam’s behalf.

C: The beauty of all of these stories was that it was an extremely cost effective campaign. For example the Glastonbury media story, which went global, was negligible in cost because it was just an email to the agents of the acts who were donating the clothing. This is always something we strive very hard to achieve.

Q: Did you face any difficulties getting the media interested in your campaign?

C: We were aware that the news agenda would be pretty busy during September. The MPs came back and it all started to kick off politically. We were unsure about how that would work for us. But I actually think a lot of outlets were looking for something a little more uplifting that wasn’t Westminster-based. You just have to be agile and adapt to what’s happening in the outside world as well as what’s happening internally.

E: When you’re talking about editorial and pitching to the media, there are never any guarantees. You just have to believe that what you’re doing is good. And that it’s news worthy. But you never know, because it’s not an exact science.

Q: How did you continue to build and sustain the interest around the campaign?

E: We are a very busy, very small team, so we jumped on every opportunity that we saw. We just kept pushing. Obviously there needs to be interest for you to be able to keep pushing, but we created momentum by being very proactive.

What we’re especially proud of is the way that it’s been adopted by people who also feel like they own the issue. There’s been loads and loads of mentions of #SecondHandSeptember in all sorts of media without necessarily attributing to Oxfam, because people have just made it their own. It’s become a thing!

And it’s done really well on social media as well. Particularly on Instagram, where we’ve had record levels of engagement. We’ve approached it very strategically, and the momentum we created throughout the Summer allowed our stories build. 

C: It’s a snowball effect. Once you launch something successfully into the media, it gets a life of its own. And that’s what’s happened here.

Q: When you started the campaign, did you have a specific target audience in mind?

C: I think it’s fair to say that we know the profile of the kinds of people who engage with the issue of sustainable fashion, and we know the profiles of the people who care about climate change because we’re very insight led here. It’s the smart way to do media work. But we are also always very aware that we’re talking to the whole of the UK through journalists and that in order to grow a movement we need to be speaking to everybody. So we wanted to make this very accessible to everyone.

Q: How have you measured the impact of the campaign?

C: We’ve got some fairly early stats on the number of people who took part, which was 62,000. We’ve also done some number crunching internally, and we can say that shoppers slashed the UK’s carbon footprint by 1500 tonnes in September – the equivalent of driving around the world 200 times!

E: We also do our evaluation of the campaign e.g. how many times the hashtag was used, how many times things were shared etc. Those numbers are very good. 37,000 people shared the hashtag. And from a comms perspective it has allowed us to make lots of new relationships, so that sets us up for the work we will continue to do beyond September.

Q: You’ve obviously had great reach and impact with this campaign, how did it compare to your original goals and targets?

C: It’s smashed them! And it’s not all down to our team. This was a massive cross organisational campaign! I guess this is a great example of what happens when you get real organisational buy in. The 62,000 people who signed up, they were being recruited at festivals across the summer by our teams on the ground. We’ve also got a social media team who were pushing out our messaging and repackaging our media and looking for content for our social channels. And we had a whole strategy around reaching out to digital influencers. Across the board, all the teams that worked across this have contributed to genuinely smashing the targets.

Find out more about the Second Hand September Campaign

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Briefing Notes: CNN

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Briefing Notes: Channel 4 News Digital

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Climate refugees – why the language the media uses matters

Since 2008, around 26.4 million people have been forced to leave their homes, not for political reasons, but because of environmental disasters. Natural catastrophes such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and droughts have been hitting humanity without prejudice; displacing millions of men, women and children all across the globe.

The label ‘Climate Refugee’ has been commonly attributed to those individuals forced out of their home countries for disturbances relating to nature and is used across mainstream media platforms. Worryingly, however, despite having to leave their nations, they do not fall under the ‘traditional refugee’ model; meaning they are not offered the same protection or rights. This is because the 1951 Refugee Convention states that a person must be fleeing direct persecution, which threatens their life or safety, to be defined as a refugee. This persecution often relates to religion, political belief, race, sexuality, and gender identity. Obviously, a climate refugee cannot claim to be persecuted by nature – at least not in any sense beyond metaphorical – and so therein lies the issue.

As climate change continues to displace more and more people every day, it is important to consider how the mainstream media addresses the topic. Dina Ionesco, the Head of the Migration, Environment and Climate Change (MECC) Division at the UN Migration Agency, feels that the term climate refugee is perhaps a harmful one for many reasons. She suggests, instead, that it should be replaced with the term ‘climate migrant’.

In an article for the UN, Ionesco reasons that, while using the term refugee resonates symbolically, it is not an accurate label. This is because climate migration is mainly internal. Individuals largely do not cross borders and therefore don’t need to seek protection from a third country, or at an international level, as refugees do. She also explains that migration is not necessarily forced, because the onset of climate change often occurs at a slow pace; therefore movement is, to a degree, a matter of choice. She suggests that countries think first of migration management and agreements rather than refugee protection. She also warns that opening the 1951 Refugee Convention, as to include climate migrants, might weaken the refugee status which would be tragic given that so many people severely need protection.

Instead of creating new terms and notions, Ionesco encourages the use of already existing laws. She suggests that human rights-based approaches are vital for addressing climate migration, pointing out that the governments of these countries must hold the primary responsibility for their citizens’ protection. She states that many migration management solutions are available to provide a status for those who move in the context of climate change impacts. These solutions could come in the form of humanitarian visas, temporary protection, authorization to stay, and regional and bilateral free movements’ agreements.

Although the matter of how the media defines climate migrants is a question that still needs to be answered with more clarity, one thing is clear: the issue of climate change is not going anywhere. In 2018, there were a recorded 17.2 million new displacements associated with disasters in 148 countries and territories. Figures such as this prove just how monumental the problem is. However, there remains no set definition within global or national law and policy to protect these environmentally displaced individuals. The sooner these groups can be fairly categorised, the sooner they can receive the right legal treatment and consequent protection. But until such a time, perhaps the mainstream media should reconsider its blanket use of the term ‘climate refugee’.

This article has been written by Hal Fish who is a political correspondent for the Immigration Advice Service; an organisation of UK immigration solicitors.

Bringing Cox’s Bazar to East London

In August, the British Red Cross gave London’s shoppers a chance to witness life in the world’s largest refugee camp.

This immersive pop-up installation of Cox’s Bazar, along with an innovative 360˚ communications campaign, hoped to remind the public of the ongoing plight of the 740,000 refugees who were forced to flee their homes in Myanmar over 2 years ago.

During their week-long installation at Stratford’s Westfield Shopping Centre, we dropped in to speak to Farah Ghulamali, Corporate Partnerships and Communications Advisor, to hear how the campaign came together.

Q: How did you develop the idea for this campaign?

We needed to do something to re-engage the media and the public with our Myanmar Appeal, so conversations around the campaign began in January. The idea for the installation actually came from something we’d seen the Norwegian Red Cross do during their Syria campaign. They rebuilt a Syrian home in Ikea’s flagship Oslo store, juxtaposing it very effectively with the Ikea show homes.

We couldn’t take people to experience Cox’s Bazar, but this installation would be the closest we could get to helping people understand the situation, what it’s like to make the journey as a refugee and what living in a refugee camp is like. I took this idea to our international and fundraising teams, and from there we developed a brief and asked different production agencies to tender for it.

British Red Cross’s immersive installation at Westfield, London in August 2019.

Q: Who was involved in bringing the idea to life?

The production company we decided to work with are called Ministry of Fun. We haven’t worked with them before, but they had a lot of experience with theatre events and set design, which was the sort of expertise we needed. It was a mammoth operation. They were working 12 hours to rig this on Sunday night – from 6 until 6! Making sure all the tech worked and that everything was accurate to the real images and content we’d shared with them.

Our content team worked really hard to deliver all the videos and photos, and we collaborated very closely with our international team to ensure that the content was accurate. We also worked with our individual giving team to have face-to-face fundraisers on the stand, informing people about how they can continue to support the appeal long-term.

Q: Why did you choose Westfield, London?

We were looking for a public space in London, so one of our partners, JCDecaux (the advertising company), came to us with a shortlist of options. Westfield seemed like the best option for the footfall – it has nearly 1 million visitors every week – and the space size. But also for the dwell time, as we know that people have time to look around when they’re shopping. JCDecaux then negotiated a really great charity rate for us – one that Ministry of Fun could hardly believe!

Q: The pop-up installation ran from August 12th – 18th, why did you choose these dates?

We wanted to do something for the 2-year anniversary which falls on August 25th, but were keen to run the campaign slightly earlier so that we could be the first ones contacting the media. The actual date also falls over the bank holiday, so we didn’t want to miss the usual footfall because of that.

Q: How have you found the reception from the public?

The feedback has been really great – whether you already know what’s going on or not, you can’t help but be gripped by what you see. Westfield in August is a really mixed audience – family, kids and older people. It has definitely helped us reach more people who wouldn’t otherwise be aware of Red Cross’s work.

The installation followed the journey of Mohamed and Roshida, and used short videos, photography and 3D sets to bring their stories to life.

Q: How have the media responded?

It’s been good so far. We’ve had Reuters and Press Association pick it up, as well as the Mail Online. We’ve also had a lot of really interesting international coverage from Germany, Australia and Spain! It’s a very multifaceted campaign and is about so much more than just engaging with the media. We’re also fundraising and trying to raise awareness in the public eye.

Q: What impact do you hope that this campaign has?

I hope that this campaign reminds people that this is the world’s largest refugee camp. That there are 1 million people living in this camp with nowhere to go, who have been forced to flee with nothing. They have had to leave their families and livelihoods behind. Many are now having to rebuild their lives, and it’s all with the support of the humanitarian agencies that are running this camp – agencies like the Red Cross. So, it’s vital that people continue to support us.

Q: What are you doing alongside the installation to make sure you’re able to deliver the desired impact?

Our social media team are posting across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn all week. We’ve also had support from Westfield’s communication channels, and a couple of our corporate partners are helping out. For example, Samsung have donated free digital ads, and WeTransfer have given us ad space on their wallpapers. We have so much content coming out of this campaign, so we knew we could deliver something really creative in the style that WeTransfer like.

We’ve also had great support from our high-value donors. We held a high-value giving event and invited our corporate prospects to come and experience the installation ahead of it opening to the public. This received some really positive feedback highlighting how the installation brought to life a lot of the work we’ve being talking about for a long time.

Q: How will you measure the impact?

We’ll measure the impact through metrics like media coverage, visits to our website and to the appeal page, donations to our appeal, social media engagement and also through the numbers of people who decide to set up a regular gift to give directly to the Myanmar appeal. For this campaign, we’re testing a new system allowing supporters to give to a specific part of the Red Cross.

Everyone is really excited about this installation, and a number of my colleagues across the UK want to take it on tour. Many of our corporate partners also want to have the installation in their offices to help staff engagement and were offering us different spaces for that. There’s so much appetite for it, and hopefully a real longevity to it!

Find out more about the British Red Cross Myanmar Appeal

If your organisation is interested in becoming a member of IBT, please get in touch here.

How ActionAid UK is empowering female photographers in their latest campaign

Earlier this year, ActionAid UK launched ‘Women by Women’ an innovative year-long campaign that elevates the underrepresented stories and voices of women and girls. We spoke to Taahra Ghazi, Deputy Director of Communications at ActionAid UK to take a look behind the scenes of this unique campaign.

Q: How did you develop the idea for Women by Women?

For some time, ActionAid has been looking for ways to champion the empowering stories of women and girls and highlight the incredible talent of women photographers in Africa, Asia and Latin America – all of which are so often overlooked.

We wanted to ensure that our visual storytellers are as diverse as the communities we are representing and raise awareness of the everyday lives and experience of women and girls living in the global south – their positive energy, strength, courage and determination to break down barriers however small.

This is how we arrived at the idea of a meeting of two women – a subject and a photographer – to tell a story.

Q: Women by Women feels very timely, why do you think it is resonating so well in the current climate?

Women by Women is reflective of an increasingly loud conversation currently happening in the photographic community concerning the roles and talents of women photographers. After years of being overlooked, lens culture is starting to take note of the amazing women photographers all over the world and the perspective they can bring to a story.

It is also a remarkably positive project which lets the artists and subjects lead with personal, empathetic content which truly reflects their lives and perspectives. The impact this creates is authentic, beautiful and moving and people connect with this. We are showing daily realities and changing the way in which women are represented in the Global South, by giving them the platform to represent themselves.

Storytelling is vital to our global knowledge and to our understanding of our fellow humans. In today’s social media-enchanted, time-strapped culture, the power of imagery is never more relevant and the need for authentic, impactful stories never more compelling.

Q: This is an ambitious campaign, with lots of collaboration with external photographers. How have you found working with the artists? How did you find the right photographers to work with?

Being able to engage and work with women photographers from the global south has been both an eyeopener and an absolute privilege. To work with so many talented photographers who have voiced not only their enthusiasm for Women by Women but have gone on to be so inspired by the women subjects has been a joyous collaboration.

As you would expect, each photographer has a different creative style from the next and allowing this creativity to fully flow, without having to give the normal NGO type brief has been very liberating. The photographers have been found through the increasingly prominent network of women in photography that’s found on the internet, databases and information that lead you to a whole host of truly incredible and diverse female talent, as well as through our federation partners.

Q: How have you spread the word about the campaign, and how has it fed into your comms/media strategy? Have you found the media receptive to the story?

Our main channel for Women by Women has been Instagram as we really want to have these photos shared and engage new audiences. But we have also been pitching to main news outlets – the launch content by female photographers in Afghanistan featured in the Guardian, for example. Most outlets are very receptive to this content as it is bold, authentic and unique.

Q: What do you think has been most successful about the campaign so far?

We have seen very high engagement rates on Instagram. The ‘behind-the-scenes’ video footage which shows the photographers in action in Afghanistan has resonated and driven most of our traffic to the website. The images which are unexpected and really break down stereotypes have been the most successful. These include the images shot by Tahmina Saleem in Afghanistan showing women doing yoga in the snow in Kabul and a street artist who spray paints murals on walls that depict powerful women.

Fakhria Momtaz takes a yoga class up to the mountains at Shahrak-e Omid Sabz in Kabul.

Q: What was the most challenging aspect of the campaign? What have you learned from the process?

Researching the stories of the women, ensuring that they can work visually and then getting the photographer on board – a photographer that we have never worked with and who is on another continent – is a lengthy process and requires both an enormous amount of work and trust for it all to come together successfully.

We have learned that there is a huge appetite for women to tell the stories of other women, that there is a real desire by the photographers to engage with their subjects and when those forces come together it produces some truly incredibly imagery.

Finally, how do you anticipate Women by Women evolving over the rest of the year? What do you hope to achieve with the campaign? What would success look like?

Initially this is a year-long project which will culminate in an exhibition of all the photographers’ work in the Spring of 2020. We hope to achieve recognition for the work of women photographers working in challenging environments in the global south, and the women and girls breaking down barriers, both big and small.

We also hope to engage more people in the work of ActionAid, so they can understand what it means to be a grassroots organisation that supports local women to support themselves. ActionAid is working for a world where the most vulnerable and forgotten women and girls can become valued and powerful. This means it is imperative that their voices are heard loud and clear across our communications.

Beyond the exhibition, we would love to see how different the world would look if all of our work across fundraising and communications were shot by women photographers and videographers living and working in the communities in the countries where they live. That would be groundbreaking.

Find out more about the campaign

If your organisation is interested in becoming a member of IBT, please get in touch here.

Briefing Notes: Children’s Media

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Briefing Notes: BBC Africa

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Islamophobia in the media: Enough is enough

I never thought I’d be the victim of Islamophobia – I’m not a Muslim, after all. But working in comms for an Islamic charity, Islamic Relief UK, I have come to accept that it is now part and parcel of my everyday life.

I’m not alone, obviously, and what I face is a tiny fraction of the Islamophobic abuse my Muslim friends and colleagues face. In our office, the social media team regularly reviews offensive remarks on our social channels, weighing up whether to ignore, rebuff or report them. In fact, so hateful are some of the comments, we even have a dedicated police officer to whom we report. Likewise, my colleagues in the media team frequently have to respond to Islamophobic reports in the press about our work.

So just how widespread is Islamophobia in the media and why does it influence all of our work?

Mainstream media: Offensive reports and negative stereotypes

Anyone interested in the subject of Islamophobia in the media must follow the incomparable Miqdaad Versi. Assistant General Secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, Versi records examples of Islamophobia in the British press and, where possible, gains corrections on inaccurate stories. It’s practically a full-time job.

As Versi says in his article Islamophobia not an issue in the British press? You’ve got to be kidding, anti-Muslim sentiment is rife in the mainstream media. Surprisingly the editor-in-chief of the Daily Express, Gary Jones, agrees. He has admitted that many of the stories published in the paper prior to his arrival had contributed to an “Islamophobic sentiment” in the media and that its front pages had sometimes been “downright offensive”.

Examples of media coverage of Islam

Anyone with even a passing interest in the news can see that Islamophobic comments are promoted by broadcasters as well, with right-wing extremists invited onto news and political programmes on a regular basis, often without being challenged about their Islamophobia. Sadly, chasing ratings seems to be more important than acquiring balance or reasoned debate.

So why do editors and broadcasters allow such words to be published or spoken without question? Versi is frank on this issue: “Let us not kid ourselves. Stories that play on the public’s fears and feed their prejudices are popular.”

In The role of the media in the spread of Islamophobia Sam Woolfe argues that “the media uses bold and harsh language to promote this kind of fear because bad news sells”. This constant drip feed of bad news focussed on Muslims and Islam merely “propagates and reinforces negative stereotypes of Muslims (e.g. that Muslims are terrorists, criminals, violent or barbaric).”

Drawing the line: Using the Riz Test

Such biased, negative coverage, however, doesn’t just appear on the news or politically-focused programmes. No, just think about last year’s inexplicably popular TV programme Bodyguard, which focused on Islamic terrorism. It pandered to every single stereotype of a Muslim: the cowed and oppressed woman (wearing the niqab) and the terrorist suicide bomber.

BBC’s popular drama, Bodyguard accused of stereotyping

It broke every single rule of the Riz Test, which adopts five criteria to measure how Muslims are portrayed on film and TV. To put is simply, if the film/show stars at least one character who is identifiably Muslim (by their ethnicity, language or clothing), one should ask: Is the character…

1. Talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of terrorism?
2. Presented as irrationally angry?
3. Presented as superstitious, culturally backwards or anti-modern?
4. Presented as a threat to a Western way of life?
5. If male, is he presented as misogynistic? Or if female, is she presented as oppressed by her male counterparts?

If the answer to any of the above is yes, then the film/TV show in question fails the test. It’s that simple. Try it next time you watch a TV show, the news or read the paper. You’ll be surprised how few actually pass the Riz Test.

The power of the media: Real consequences

So, are Muslims disproportionately bad or does the media focus only on the bad stories?

In Spreading Islamophobia: Consequences Of Negative Media Representations, Muniba Saleem in fact highlights how current negative representations of Muslims in the media actually propagate harmful behaviour. Saleem explains how, given the extent to which the British public is influenced by the media, negative portrayals of Muslims in the media result in an increase in “negative attitudes towards Muslims” and “support for policies that harm Muslims.”

Having worked in international development for the past 25 years, I have myself noticed exactly the same thing when I first came to work at Islamic Relief. In my blog on Islamophobia, I point out how many of my friends and family automatically had negative assumptions about Islamic Relief based not on their knowledge of the charity, but on their ignorance of Islam and Muslims as a whole.

Given that only 5% of the British population is Muslim, it is likely that most people in the mainstream know very few Muslims, so their negative perceptions are unlikely to be based on actual experiences. Instead, they are much more likely to be based on what they have seen or heard in the mainstream media. Some of this is, of course, based on the reporting of terrorist acts perpetrated by Islamists. Yet in relative terms, are Muslims actually committing more terrorist acts than anyone else?

Well, the figures speak for themselves. Recent research undertaken after the brutal murders in Woolwich found that in the decade prior to that event, press coverage on Muslims and Islam in British-based newspapers had increased by around 270% and 91% were of a negative nature. What’s more, Islamists are three times more likely to be called ‘terrorists’ in media coverage of attacks than those on the far-right. Islamists were (rightly) referred to as terrorists in 78% of news coverage, however far-right extremists were only identified by this label in 27% of articles.

Social media obviously plays its part too. When each terrorist attack happens, a flurry of offensive tweets are unleashed. Journalists in search of a quick soundbite and so-called balance seek out soundbites from the worst offenders. Thus people like convicted criminal and former-EDL leader, Tommy Robinson, gain a disproportionate amount of coverage.

Islamophobia in the media: The effects

The reality of Islamophobia in the media affects Muslims in every area of their lives. Here at Islamic Relief, every time we carry out a fundraising or advocacy campaign, we have to think carefully about how this will be reported in the press and on social media. Of course, every NGO worth its salt should carry out a risk assessment on its campaigns. However, not every NGO has to think about how their words or stories might be twisted by an Islamophobic (often far-right) agenda.

As Ramadan begins, we launch our latest campaign featuring an inspirational quote from the Qur’an on buses in major cities asking: “Can you be 5:32?” This Qur’anic verse states: “Whosoever saves a life, it is as though they had saved the whole of mankind”.

Islamic Relief UK’s Ramadan campaign

It’s a beautiful inspirational quote which reminds Muslims of the sanctity of life and recalls our own mission – to transform and save lives. Nonetheless, we had to prepare ourselves for potential backlash. Some of the many questions we had to consider at length included:

• Would we be attacked for advertising on buses, with people asking why we do so when Islamic terrorists have blown themselves up on buses?
• Would we be told we were only allowed to put this message on the bus because we have a Muslim mayor?
• If we quote the Qur’an to illustrate a positive point, will another quote be parroted back at us by far-right extremists to highlight what they think of as a negative quote?
• If we go on TV or radio to defend the campaign, is there a possibility that the interview will get hijacked by Tommy Robinson?
• Is there a possibility that our ads will be vandalised?
• Will we be asked to justify the actions of the Sultan of Brunei (making homosexuality punishable by death)?

Are we being paranoid? Are we looking too much into things? Absolutely not. All of the above and more have happened to us over the past year alone. It’s horrid that as we prepare for the holy month of Ramadan – a month in which Muslims partake in immense charitable giving – that we should have to prepare for an Islamophobic backlash in the media and on social media. Yet this is the reality.

So next time you see a negative headline about a Muslim or Islam, ask yourselves what’s the real story behind the headline? Likewise, as you tune into a new TV show, film or video game featuring a Muslim character, ask yourselves ‘does it pass the Riz Test?’ If the answer is ‘no’, then simply switch it off. Please. As a non-Muslim, I can confidently say that such features do more harm than good. Islamophobia in the media threatens us all, whatever our faith and cultural background. It’s time to put an end to this abuse, today. Be aware of media bias, use the Riz test and ensure that you’re not propagating harmful Islamophobic narratives. We all deserve better.

This article has been written by Judith Escribano, Head of Communications at Islamic Relief UK.

The story behind the world’s first voice petition

Like all great stories, malaria is a tale of villains (the mosquitoes that carry the deadly parasite), heroes (from researchers to funders), tragedy (the billions of lives lost) and happy endings (knowing that we will defeat it).

We’ve seen tremendous progress, with seven million lives saved since 2000. But in November 2017 there was a major twist in the tale. Funding and political attention had dwindled causing progress to stall and risk being reversed. We needed to act, and fast. So in February 2018, David Beckham fronted the launch of Malaria Must Die, a global white label campaign that set out to reframe public perceptions of malaria and inspire political and private sector action.

The campaign laid the groundwork for the Malaria Summit held in April 2018 during the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London when 53 leaders made a commitment to halve malaria by 2023. If delivered, this will save the lives of 650,000 people and protect 350 million more, mainly young children.

Cut to 2019 our aim is to sustain the campaign momentum and find an authentic way to unite a wide range of voices in a powerful way, to drive the conversation and demonstrate a strong, palpable demand for action. With this being the age of the voice, where smart speakers and voice recognition devices are becoming part of our everyday lives, Malaria Must Die is taking the humble petition into the 21^st century with the world’s first voice petition to end malaria.

We wanted to gather, hear and amplify the voices of those affected by malaria; those global household names who are part of the fight to end malaria; those on the front line; those at home who care; businesses who are helping lead the charge; leaders who have stepped up to the plate and micro-influencers.

The Malaria Must Die Voice Petition launched on 9^th April via a short film, produced by Ridley Scott Associates, where David Beckham appears to speak nine languages. But the voices are not all his own. Instead, using emerging AI video synthesis technology, we hear David speaking the voices of men and women from around the world, including malaria survivors.

The petition will capture a breadth of voices – geographically and across sectors. These collective voices will be packaged to create a malaria “roar” and used in a variety of ways, critically at a series of global and political moments in 2019 including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria replenishment in October where we want to grab the attention of leaders in a unique and memorable way.

Our media strategy for the campaign focused on online and broadcast coverage, ensuring that people saw the film and were directed to join the petition. We had complementary spokespeople, from the malaria survivors whose voices featured in the film, to Malaria No More UK supporters with powerful personal stories and experts who could speak about technical aspects of the disease. This enabled us to place opportunities over 18-hour period, from Sky Sunrise to evening radio. We have no advertising budget but thanks to our partnership with Dentsu Aegis Network we are fortunate to receive pro bono advertising and agency support.

As this was a global campaign we also worked with partners around the world to secure international coverage and saw online, print and broadcast coverage in key strategic markets including US, India, France, Nigeria and South Africa. A critical component of the communications strategy was social media and we were able to reach a large global audience thanks to the film and petition being promoted on David Beckham’s channels and those of other high-profile supporters and organisations. So far, the media coverage has created 44 million opportunities to see the campaign, with over 500 pieces of coverage, digital impressions have reached over 416 million, and video views are over 2.6 million. The campaign will continue to build with several moments planned in the next six months to inspire further sign ups for action.

Support the campaign

This article has been written by Vicky Gashe, Head of Comms at Malaria No More UK

Why children’s TV needs the support of campaigners for international development

What children watch on TV has a major impact on their understanding of their world and could affect their future support for, and interest in, international development.

By Lorriann Robinson, IBT advocacy adviser 

The UK is recognised as a global leader in aid and development and the generosity of the UK Government is matched, perhaps even surpassed by that of the UK public. Over the past 30 years, the UK public have donated more than a £1 billion to Comic Relief and in the past month alone, the public donated over £33 million to help families in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi to recover from Cyclone Idai.

Campaigners understand that we need to keep making the case for aid and development and this requires strong public support for global development. Development agencies often engage young people through their programmes and campaigns, but few make the connection between what children see on their TV screens and how this might influence support for development causes in the years to come. There is already compelling research to show these issues are connected.

New IBT research shows children want to know more about the global world. 80% of the children we surveyed for The Challenge of Children’s TV said they were interested in the world outside the UK; 86% felt it was important for them to know what was happening in the world but only 9% said that they knew a lot about other countries. Children’s programmes that focus on other countries are greatly skewed towards North America and there is very limited coverage of some regions, particularly the Middle East. Despite the interest from children to see more television content about the wider world, this need was not being adequately met by the UK’s public service broadcasters. Overall IBT’s research found that international issues and events are not on most children’s radars.

All of this means children are missing opportunities to understand the developing world. The share of television content telling children about the developing world has dropped significantly between 2007 and 2018, and last year, only 17% of new international content shown on the UK’s main public service broadcast channels featured the developing world, compared with 30% in 2007. Children interviewed for IBT’s study shared the same, sometimes negative, perceptions of Africa, having watched television adverts and news items that depict poverty and suffering on the continent.

This matters for children, for the UK, and for development causes. High quality children’s content about the global word can help children to understand and contextualise news events which can help to reduce their anxieties about these events. It can also help to promote social cohesion, encourage democratic engagement and help children to develop skills that will be essential to the 21^st century workplace.

Children are the development supporters, campaigners, and leaders of tomorrow and it’s in all of our interest to ensure they have a balanced understanding of developing countries, the people who live in these countries and the issues that affect their lives. As IBT’s research shows, children are being let down by broadcasters who are not doing enough to show children in the UK a balanced perspective of the wider world.

IBT’s new research report, The Challenge of Children’s TV, looks at how children see the world, where they get their information from and how new media content can be more effectively targeted at children to engage them with what is happening in the wider world.

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Briefing Notes: Beyond Today, BBC Podcast

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Why Children Need To Understand Global Issues

For our third article in our The Challenge of Children’s TV blog series, we heard from the Executive Director of Unicef UK, Mike Penrose, about the benefits of children being aware of global issues, the best way to engage them in the wider world and Unicef’s collaboration with First News, a weekly news publication for children.

Q: In your opinion, what are the benefits of children in the UK being aware of what is happening in the wider world?

At Unicef UK, we know that children who are engaged in international issues at a young age are more likely to be active citizens who want to make a positive contribution to the world.

There is also research which suggests that getting involved in action towards a better world has a positive impact on young people’s mental health. They will gain a better understanding of the differences between people, which they will then embrace, rather than fear.

Q: From your experience, are children in the UK interested in events taking place around the world or in the lives of people in other countries?

We believe that children in the UK are incredibly engaged and interested in the lives of people in other countries.

Thousands of children have taken part in Outright, which allows them to learn about important global issues in a fun and engaging way, and ensures their voices are heard by key political decision-makers. Children have also worked on our family reunion campaign, which saw them championing for the rights of refugees to be reunited with family members in the UK. As well as lobbying for the Safe Schools Declaration, which was endorsed by the Government. It really demonstrates the power of children’s voices to create change.

Our work in schools across the country never fails to show that children are incredibly engaged and keen to learn about other people’s lives from around the world.

Q: How aware do you think children in the UK are about global issues?

From my perspective, centennials are incredibly socially conscious and I think there is always an eagerness for children to learn more about children who live in different countries. However, it is often the case that a child’s awareness is reflective of whether they are taught about international issues at school or at home.

Through Unicef’s Rights Respecting Schools Award, we work with schools up and down the country to ensure that children are aware of their human rights. Our teaching resources are full to the brim of stories about children from around the world and one of the main areas of impact of this work is the increase in children and young people’s support for global justice. Our Rights Respecting Schools regularly tell us that by linking their curriculum to global learning they have increased the levels of pupil engagement.

I would urge all schools to make sure their students are taught about their rights to ensure that they leave education as global citizens.

Q: Are there any examples of TV or online content that you think has been successful in engaging children in the UK – and if so, why?

Thankfully, there is some brilliant content, which both engages and represents children. First News is an excellent example, with over 2.2 million readers each week, they produce articles using child- friendly language to explain complex issues. For instance, we recently worked with them on a Special Report about the Yemen conflict.

During Soccer Aid for Unicef in 2018, we also worked with First News to send Kendra, one of their young reporters and a pupil at a Rights Respecting School, to Lesotho to report on Unicef’s education work there. It was brilliant to see Kendra engaging with school children in Lesotho and bringing their voices to life in the UK through her fantastic reporting. I am always incredibly proud of our work with First News and hope to do more media work with publications which both represent and engage children in 2019.

Q: In your opinion what should the media be doing to increase the engagement of children in the UK with the wider world?

While the BBC have been leading the way with children’s news for decades thanks to Newsround, last year it was brilliant to hear about Sky News commissioning Fresh Start Media to produce FYI, a weekly children’s news show. Not only is it informative, but by having child presenters they are putting young people right at the forefront of news reporting.

We have heard repeatedly that centennials are incredibly politically motivated, therefore, more broadcasters should consider making informative programmes which engage and represent young people. In the age of ‘fake news’ it is important that children can rely on a number of trusted sources to educate them about world issues.

Q: How important is this issue for Unicef?

At Unicef, it is a vital part of our core mission to uphold the rights of every child. Therefore, it is incredibly important for us that every child has a right to access reliable information, have a say in decisions that affect them and to have a quality education. A vital part of upholding those rights is ensuring that children can learn about international issues and understand their capacity to bring about positive change in the world.

IBT’s new research report, The Challenge of Children’s TV, looks at how children see the world, where they get their information from and how new media content can be more effectively targeted at children to engage them with what is happening in the wider world.

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Kids’ TV: Engaging young people with the wider world

For the second article in our The Challenge of Children’s TV blog series, we spoke to Kevin Watkins, CEO of Save The Children, about why it is so important to educate our children about the wider world, how media can engage children in global issues and what needs to be done to improve the media they have access to.

Q: In your opinion, what are the benefits of children in the UK being aware of what is happening in the wider world?

It’s so important that young people understand the world outside of their immediate environment of school, family and friends. Not only does it help children become more empathetic, considerate and conscientious people, it also allows them to develop into responsible adults who contribute to a fairer and better world.

Children are affected by global politics and events everyday – whether they realise it or not – and the more they engage with this the better they’ll be able to advocate for change, speak out for their own rights and those of other children, and realise their potential.

Q: From your experience, are children in the UK interested in events taking place around the world? How aware do you think they are of global issues?

Whilst this varies hugely depending on children’s ages, backgrounds and interests, much as it does with adults, this generation is more aware than ever before of the world around them due to an increasing exposure via social media.

The young people we meet through our campaigning work in the UK tend to be more empathetic towards others than adults, with a strong sense of justice and fairness when discussing global issues that affect other people – particularly around conflict, refugees and climate change.

Q: Are there any examples of TV or online content that you think has been successful in engaging children in the UK – and if so, why?

First News and Newsround are both unbiased, engaging and appropriate in their approach to talking to children about the world. Equally, we’ve seen children engaging with content not specifically intended for a youth audience, such as the plastic revolution sparked by the Blue Planet series.

The biggest opportunity to engage young people is through social media – whether that’s YouTube channels like Vsauce and Kurzgesagt which take an interesting and creative approach to educating children about specific topics, or Instagram influencers discussing themes of mental health, gender/identity, diversity and environmental issues.

Q: In your opinion what should the media be doing to increase the engagement of children in the UK with the wider world?

Young people are most inspired by the stories and experiences of other young people and leaders (i.e. Malala, Amika George or the March For Our Lives movement) so the media should ensure it puts their stories at the heart of any content focused on engaging children.

Q: How important is this issue for Save the Children?

This is vital. We are the world’s largest child rights’ organisation – empowering, educating and informing children about their rights, the world around them and the events that will shape their future is at the heart of our purpose as an organisation.

IBT’s new research report, The Challenge of Children’s TV, looks at how children see the world, where they get their information from and how new media content can be more effectively targeted at children to engage them with what is happening in the wider world.

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5 things you need to know about children’s TV…

Children’s television is failing.

The UK government has recognised a market failure in production of kids’ TV content – an inevitable side effect of a 40% drop in funding over the last decade*.

This has led to new initiatives from both Ofcom (the media regulator) and DCMS (the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) to find urgent solutions to the inadequacies of children’s television content.

With kids’ programming now consisting of up to 98% repeats* of old content and much less new, high quality content in production, there has never been a better time to get up to speed on the issues (and solutions) within kids’ television.

In the first of this series of blogs exploring the challenge of kids’ TV and how it can be better used to inform children about the world around them, we summarise the 5 key things you need to know about kids’ television.

1. TV is one of the main sources of information about the wider world for children in the UK

Despite the fast-changing nature of media consumption, for many children in the UK, television is still one of their main sources of information about the wider world*. Though this presents a potentially invaluable opportunity to use the platform to help our children better understand the world around them, it is important that its content can compete with the growing pull of online platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Unlike our public service broadcasters (BBC, Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5), these online platforms are neither regulated for accuracy, nor under any obligation to produce content which doesn’t cause harm or encourage the spread of ‘fake news’.

2. Children want to know more about the world

Our own research shows that 86% of children think it is important that they know what is happening in other countries, but only 9% feel that they know a lot about what is happening outside the UK*.

This illustrates a real appetite for global stories, and an important gap in the market that broadcasters and producers should work to fill as part of the new efforts to improve children’s media.

3. Children’s TV needs to do a better job of preparing kids for the world

Though programmes such as CBBC’s Newsround and Sky’s FYI are doing an admirable job of featuring a wide range of international stories, children are still hugely limited in their exposure to stories and cultures from outside the UK. This is especially troubling given the increasing demands of the globalised world and workplace that our children are growing up into.

We need to act now to create a better media future for our kids. Are we laying the foundations for a generation unengaged and unaware of the world outside the UK’s borders?

Most experts agree that ensuring children understand the world outside their immediate environment is crucial – and television has a significant role to play in this.

“Children are affected by global politics and events everyday – whether they realise it or not – and the more they engage with this the better they’ll be able to advocate for change, speak out for their own rights and those of other children, and realise their potential.” – Kevin Watkins, Chief Executive of Save the Children UK.

4. There isn’t enough international kids’ TV content

53% of children we polled wanted to see more TV and video about what happens in other countries*. This is unsurprising given that in 2018, there were only 77 hours of new international content on CBBC, CITV, CBeebies and Channel 5*.

Reduced funding and growing online competition is making it increasingly difficult to get quality television made for younger audiences – particularly the bigger budget international stories. However, Sky’s successful launch of its new kids’ news show, FYI, demonstrates that there is a demand for a broader range of stories, and broadcasters should be incentivised to produce more of this international content.

5. We have an opportunity to change kids’ TV for the better

“We need to do everything we can, right now, to create a media future for children that we can be proud of, so we can all look back in 10 years’ time and be sure that we didn’t let a generation down.” – Tony Hall, Director General of the BBC.

We can all agree that we want our children to grow up as engaged and informed citizens, able to live and work in an increasingly globalised world. However, the current media landscape is failing to provide our children with the necessary content to help them understand their world, and its multitude of different people, politics and cultures.

As part of the government’s plans to save children’s TV, DCMS will be launching the Young Audiences Content Fund in April 2019. With £57 million set aside, this fund hopes to encourage more production of quality content for children by the commercial public service broadcasters like ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.

Though this is a good start, it doesn’t address the growing deficit of international kids’ content. We are therefore calling for DCMS to ensure that some of this fund is reserved for producing content that informs kids about the wider world.

IBT’s new research report, The Challenge of Children’s TV, looks at how children see the world, where they get their information from and how new media content can be more effectively targeted at children to engage them with what is happening in the wider world.

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*Facts and figures based on research carried out for our ‘The Challenge of Children’s TV‘ report.

Briefing Notes: BBC’s Today Programme

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How do we get the media interested in some of the world’s forgotten crises?

By Siobhán Sheerin, Senior Communications Officer, Concern Worldwide UK 

I attended February’s IBT briefing with the BBC’s Today programme assistant editor, Laura Cooper. It was a full room of course; after all, the Today programme is an institution, and in many ways sets the broadcast news agenda for the day.  In the words of Laura herself, Today has the “luxury of beginning a conversation for the day”, and its prominence internationally and domestically means it always attracts significant players.

Right now anyone who works for an NGO is acutely aware that given the current, rather febrile, political environment, there is no shortage of domestic news – so how do we get more ‘under the radar’ stories with an international focus on to the news agenda?

Compelling human narratives

Laura said that Today was looking to expand its international focus, and cited an example of an upcoming trip to Beirut to look at the dilemmas facing Syrian refugees who are considering returning home. She also talked about the positive response to some of the recent outside broadcasts with Mishal Husain – one from Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, and one from Gaza, which focused on mothers on each side of the divide.  The reason for their success she said was a “compelling human narrative.”

Given the context most NGOs work in, “compelling human narratives” is not something we are short of. We have hundreds of human stories to help personalise the issues we want to highlight. We also have a responsibility to the people we work with to make sure their stories are told. Maybe we need to do more to make sure these stories are at the forefront of our pitches when approach news journalists?

When Laura mentioned a trip to Liberia in 2012, a collaboration with Save the Children, which involved several follow up trips and so gave the opportunity for more in-depth coverage, Mark Galloway from the IBT, who was in the Chair, asked why they had done nothing like this since then.  Laura admitted that Today tends to focus on stories in the news – and there’s the rub. Whilst undeniably important, Gaza is always news. Syria is always news.  These are tangible conflicts with recognisable actors, a role for UK foreign policy and international western players. But as Laura herself said – the BBC are ever conscious of resources – if they are going there, it means they are not going somewhere else.

Lack of coverage of countries not linked to the news agenda

For me, and it seems for others in the room, this highlights the lack of coverage of countries not necessarily linked to the news agenda.  Rose Caldwell from Concern Worldwide UK asked: “What about DRC? What about Central African Republic? What about the crises that fall under the radar?”  Another person mentioned Darfur. Laura said that these places had been covered but acknowledged that there were definitely countries which were being unreported.

The Central African Republic is officially the world’s hungriest country, with a population of just under five million, and half of these people need humanitarian assistance.  I can’t remember the Today programme mentioning that recently. Is it because we as NGOs need to work harder to convince programmes like Today, that there is value in giving a voice to people from a country most people couldn’t find on a map? Or is it because countries like CAR, with their long drawn-out protracted crises of hunger, conflict and displacement, can’t be linked in any obvious way to the news agenda? Or maybe the issues can’t be explored fully in a short broadcast segment? Should we as NGOs focus less on getting airtime for our CEOs and work harder to find the individual stories – the ‘compelling human narratives? ‘

Laura said that Today believes in putting time into the stories that take more time to tell – which also means more effort from us as NGOs to convince broadcasters these are stories worth covering.   Surely somewhere like CAR would fit into this category?   It would certainly fit the Today criteria of giving the listener something “significantly different to what they have heard before.”

Photo credit: Chris de Bode/Panos Pictures for Concern Worldwide

IBT holds monthly briefings with senior members of the media. These popular sessions have helped our members pitch successfully, create better informed plans and work more effectively across teams.

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The Future of Children’s TV

In the spring we will be publishing a new research report that looks at children, how they see the world, where they get their information from, which media they consume and how new media content can be more effectively targeted at children to enable them to be better informed about the rest of the world.

Children’s television is currently under the spotlight. Parliamentarians are increasingly concerned about the quality of life of children growing up in the UK and the Government has recognised that there is market failure in the production of home grown content aimed at children. This means that the market alone is not producing content of sufficient quality and range.

DCMS (the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) has therefore earmarked the sum of £51m taken from the licence fee to be redirected at children’s content over the next three years.  The Government will be launching a Contestable Fund in April which aims to encourage increased production of content for children by the commercial public service broadcasters (PSBs) – ITV, Channel 4 and Five.

In addition, Ofcom, the media industry regulator, has asked the commercial PSBs to address the current deficit in supply of new UK produced content for children on their channels. They are due to report back to Ofcom with plans by the end of March and Ofcom will publicly report on this in June.

We believe that this makes a report on children’s TV timely as it gives us an opportunity to influence the type of content that the PSBs will be producing. Our goal is that some of this new content will cover global stories and issues, in a way that is accessible and engaging for children of all ages.

Why we need new research

The aim of our new research will be to present an evidence base that establishes both the need for new international content and the benefits of such content.

There is existing research to show that an awareness among children of how people live in other countries leads to greater tolerance (Think Global, 2010). And recently published research from Childwise shows that in 2018 the number of children worrying about war, terrorism and global events has increased significantly in the past year – one in three children aged between 9 and 16 said they were more worried about conflict in the world than anything else.

It is IBT’s view that no broadcaster in the UK provides adequate content to explain the wider world to children. The reason we focus on broadcasters is that the content they transmit is regulated, high quality and produced from a UK cultural perspective. Online content is not regulated for harm and offence or accuracy.

This report will examine the real benefits of children having access to international content, establish the current level of provision of such content and explore with children of different age groups the type of content they enjoy and the kind of international content that is most likely to appeal to them.

We are keen to hear about the experience of IBT members who work with children so do please get in touch if you’d like to find out more about this research.

Mark Galloway
IBT Executive Director
January 3, 2019

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Put Down Your Flags: Why consolidation is key to better aid delivery

by Simon O’Connell, Mercy Corps Executive Director

South Sudan is host to a myriad of international NGOs. The world’s newest country is in a state of protracted crisis. A combination of long-running conflict, a weak economy and drought has driven 3.7 million South Sudanese from their homes and left seven million people in need of aid.

In response, a lot of organisations are trying to help – often under extremely difficult and dangerous circumstances. Alongside 214 national non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the South Sudan NGO Forum includes 115 international NGOs. My organisation, Mercy Corps, is one of them.

There is little doubt that these NGOs provide vital assistance in a country affected by long-term conflict and food insecurity that last year resulted in famine. The aid delivered by NGOs is, literally, life-saving. But, is the NGO sector structured in the best way possible to have maximum impact?

Ensuring large scale, lasting impact in fragile and volatile places like South Sudan comes with significant challenges. There are only 200 miles of paved road across the country, and much NGO work is reliant on air transportation. Risks to both people and resources are high; logistics are complex; security assessments and protection are time-consuming and difficult. All of this makes working here extremely expensive.

Whilst extensive coordination and information sharing does occur, there are over 115 different international agencies in South Sudan, each taking on the individual management responsibilities and costs of operating in this highly fragile environment. With humanitarian needs in South Sudan, and across dozens more countries around the world today, at almost unprecedented levels, more needs to be done by international agencies to join forces to reduce duplication and improve aid delivery and efficiency.

The large number of organisations can also affect the quality of aid delivery. Recipients of international assistance are sometimes left bewildered and frustrated by the number of different agencies entering and leaving their lives.

Why are there so many international agencies?

Each individual NGO has its own existential imperatives. Each was founded with its own particular mandate. Each has to raise money and to do that, each needs to be visible. Intentionally or not, this puts NGOs in competition with each other – for exposure, supporters and, ultimately, money. Each NGO needs to fly its flag (and frequently those of its funders) in places like South Sudan, because their visibility is central to their ability to raise the money they need. This perceived competition between agencies and a focus on bolstering brands and identities also affects trust, with negative stories about NGOs often linked to the crowded NGO landscape. With the media central to the public perception of aid organisations, the effects of these stories add up, with only 46% of people in the UK viewing NGOs as trustworthy.

Yet, in today’s world of extensive humanitarian need and pockets of deep, protracted fragility, NGOs still have a crucial role to play. Globally there are an estimated 10 million NGOs of one kind or another. They have contributed to extraordinary progress in recent decades, with both extreme poverty and under-5 mortality falling dramatically. But two billion people still live in places affected by instability, conflict and violence. There are 68.5 million forcibly displaced people – the highest number on record. Climate change is an increasingly active and urgent reality. With such complex issues and widespread needs, now is not the time to reduce aid budgets or commitments to addressing the root causes of poverty and displacement. It’s time to take concrete steps to improving how aid is delivered.

A key part of the answer of how to do this is through some consolidation of the international NGO sector – to improve efficiency, diminish duplication and ultimately be better for the recipients of their assistance.

Why not just better coordination?

Tremendous efforts have been made over many years to improve the way NGOs work with each other, with UN agencies, with governments and others: joint needs assessments, clusters, pooled funds, Humanitarian Country Teams, the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response, the professionalisation of humanitarianism, the idea of ‘humanitarian passports’ – the list of initiatives to improve coordination in the humanitarian sector is long.

NGOs have demonstrated a significant ability to work together, for example the Consortium of British Humanitarian Agencies – now the Start Network – that took responsibility for a whole chunk of the UK’s humanitarian funding and has gone on to deliver extremely efficient, rapid and successful responses. The Start Network continues to push the boundaries of cooperation in the sector, while NGOs have also played their part in the Grand Bargain – a major set of commitments agreed at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, outlining increased cooperation in a range of ways.

These initiatives show the desire of organisations to work better together, but cooperation itself comes at a cost, with large amounts of time and resources spent on initiatives to improve NGO coordination.

There will also always be a limit to how efficiently hundreds of different organisations are able to work with each other. Each of those organisations still has to carry, to some extent, the cost of their own logistics, security, assessments, and information gathering. NGOs remain independent organisations with their own identities, responsibilities and costs.

Consolidation – a solution to greater scale, impact and value for money

The idea of consolidation in the NGO sector has generally been controversial, evoking an image of predatory capitalism that is anathema to many in the sector. Whilst occasional consolidation between NGOs has occurred, this has invariably been driven by financial imperatives. Instead of NGO mergers happening only when organisations are in a state of financial stress, they should be incentivised to merge voluntarily – simultaneously reducing operating costs, inefficiencies and confusion for those on the receiving end of aid. By reducing the number of NGOs, efforts to improve cooperation and coordination, including in areas like safeguarding, would become easier.

That does not mean we should eradicate the diversity that is in many ways the NGO sector’s greatest strength. There’s a tremendous need for innovation and nimbleness in the aid and development sector; often more present within smaller organisations. Everywhere is different, and it is impossible to have cookie-cutter approaches that apply equally well in Yemen as they do in Mali – or indeed here domestically in the UK. I am not advocating that aid is done solely by a small number of mega agencies, and international NGOs need to continue to up their game to increase public trust. They must continue to demonstrate efficiency, and increase transparency and accountability. They must also prioritise supporting and strengthening local and national aid providers.

Locally-led, less bureaucratic structures and systems are essential, and this is where local and national NGOs tend to excel. They often have a particular geographical or operational niche that brings something unique. At the international level, however, there are too many organisations duplicating each other’s work and needlessly competing with each other. While each of the 214 local and national organisations in the South Sudan NGO Forum may be offering something distinctive, I simply don’t believe that it is necessary for 115 international organisations to be there. Instead, a smaller number of international agencies should articulate how they work with local organisations to deliver for crisis-affected people.

How to get it done

Consolidating the international NGO sector will require incentives that outweigh the existing motivations of competing for visibility, profile, influence and funds. Donors can play a role here.

Institutional donors like DFID and USAID have already shown repeatedly that they are willing to fund initiatives that enhance collaboration, as examples like their Humanitarian Grand Challenge illustrate. Now, they need to go one step further. I call upon donors – both governmental and private – to establish a ‘Consolidation Initiative’ for international agencies willing to join together permanently. This would require some one-off costs, but would make long-term sense against the ongoing cost of coordination.

Beyond funding, governments and influential stakeholders should commit to opening their doors for conversation with NGOs that show a willingness to consolidate. Access to government representatives is valuable for NGOs as they seek to influence on behalf of the people they serve. Committing to increasing such access would provide a further incentive for consolidation.

Ultimately, though, it is up to NGOs to make the running on this issue. I call on my fellow NGO peers and those in the international aid and development community to join me in exploring how consolidation might be achieved, gathering evidence for the best approaches to take, and committing to generating efficiencies that will deepen the impact of our work at this critically important time.

Consolidation would go beyond the perpetual incentivisation of cooperation. It would produce a structural change that would improve how the NGO sector functions permanently. It would boost trust in NGOs by showing sincerity around improving efficiency rather than competing for exposure. It would elevate the role of local and national NGOs, as the main source of diversity and delivery in the system. Most importantly, it would improve the assistance provided by NGOs for people affected by poverty and crisis. With the ongoing question of how to engage with the world, the consolidation of international NGOs could be a core part of the answer.

A version of this blog originally appeared in Third Sector and has since been updated.

You can follow Simon on Twitter @sioconnell1

Filmmaking with your smartphone

“The best camera is the one that you have with you.”

Everything you need to create engaging, attention-grabbing content is sitting in your back pocket.

Gone are the days of dragging around a 30kg camera bag, 5 different lighting fixtures, 3 sound guys and a couple thousand pounds worth of complicated editing software. Smartphones have finally evened the playing field for content creators, and it goes without saying that this is excellent news for charities.

Last week, we ran the second IBT ‘How to Shoot and Edit with a Smartphone’ workshop. Back by popular demand, the hands-on training session with experienced trainer and YouTube expert, Nat Hawley, takes our members from filming newbies to confident self-shooting vloggers.

The session began with a lively discussion about how we engage with video content online, and the best ways for charities to utilise smartphones for this platform. The group were unanimous in their ambition to be able to use smartphones for filming whilst working overseas and were keen to start learning the skills required to do so.

First up, The Selfie.

“You cannot ask people to stand in front of your camera until you fully appreciate how awkward and uncomfortable it is for most people.” – Nat Hawley.

Acting as both the perfect icebreaker and an exercise in framing, manual focusing and lighting, the group’s selfie-taking introduced many of the fundamental principles of shooting with a smartphone.

Nat went on to lead the group through every aspect of the filming process, from his top tips for recording sound on the go, to understanding the video content landscape.

After a crash course in the latest smartphone editing software, the group were ready to put their new skills to the test in the afternoon’s challenge: Create a 1-minute clip for your organisation’s social media platforms.

Several hours of script-writing, shot-framing, and clip-cutting later, and the group had a selection of professional quality videos ready to show on the big screen. The results were impressive. From reinvigorating the usual charity “fact list” with energetic jump cuts and personal anecdotes, to using comedy and narrative to show off a new campaign – the videos shown proved just how effective filmmaking with a smartphone can be.

The ever-growing capabilities of the smartphone mean that content creation has never been easier, and charities embracing this powerful tool have a world of opportunities at their fingertips. Now you can film, edit and broadcast to the world from the little box in your back pocket – so what are you waiting for?

Is video the best way to promote your charity?

Click here to read our ‘Video First’ report for more information on the media landscape in the UK, the trends which are influencing it and where the opportunities lie for NGOs wishing to produce their own video content.

3 ways INGOs can harness the power of the podcast

2018 has been the year of the podcast.

Ofcom has found that about 6 million of us in the UK listen to podcasts on a weekly basis – a figure that has almost doubled over the last 5 years. With an endless catalogue of listening options, and more and more organisations turning to the format to grow their brand awareness, it seems inevitable that these figures will continue to grow.

Podcasts offer the charity sector an excitingly accessible new platform for reaching their audiences. So how can your charity best harness the power of the podcast?

1 – Feature as a Guest Speaker

Delve into iTunes’ exhaustive podcast directory and you will find a plethora of shows discussing the latest sector news, trends and practical advice. You will also find that most of these shows regularly feature guest speakers.

There are few other formats that provide such an engaged and focused audience – a recent study by Acast found that 76% of listeners said they had followed up on an ad or message they heard in a podcast. So, it seems logical that featuring as a podcast guest speaker offers the perfect platform for you to talk about your latest campaign or fundraiser.

Decide who in your team offers the best combination of high-profile influence and engaging radio patter, find the shows your target audience are listening to, and start reaching out to podcast hosts. This article by Thinkific provides a very detailed guide on how to get started.

Our Favourite Informative Podcasts: Displaced (IRC), Good Charity Bad Charity and NCVO

2 – Pitch Your Stories to Podcasts

Comms teams in the charity sector are very accustomed to the challenges of getting the attention of print journalists. Why not try pitching to podcast producers instead?

There are a number of fantastic podcasts covering stories from the development sector, each focusing their output on curating a series of engaging, human led stories.

Last month, IBT ran a networking event with Guardian Global Development’s, Lucy Lamble – the driving force behind the Guardian’s brilliant, ‘Small Changes’ podcast. Whilst meeting with our members, she spoke about the huge potential of podcasts for the sector and encouraged our member charities to send her their pitches for character driven stories.

“The digital reach is far far bigger than print. There are lots of different ways of pushing things out: short films, Facebook, podcasts… All reaching people who aren’t necessarily Guardian readers.”
– Lucy Lamble, Guardian Global Development

Our Favourite Story-led Podcasts: Awake at Night (UNHCR), and Small Changes (Guardian Global Development)

3 – Start Your Own Podcast

With consistently rising engagement numbers, widely accessible listening platforms and entry-level recording equipment available at a surprisingly affordable cost, there has never been a better time to start your own podcast.

A number of charities have successfully broken into the world of podcasts: from Amnesty International’s, ‘In Their Own Words’ to ODI’s humanitarian interview series. Providing you have the time, resources and content worth broadcasting, this can be a great way to utilise the rise in podcast popularity.

In the new year, IBT will be running a day-long podcast workshop for our members. Run by experienced podcast host and trainer, Lucy Lucraft, the sessions will cover everything from navigating the audio landscape, to the technicalities of recording your first episode.

Our Favourite Charity-run Podcasts: In Their Own Words (Amnesty International), Completely Optional Knowledge (Greenpeace), ODI

If 2018 has been the year the podcast found its place among mainstream media, then let 2019 be the year the charity sector harnesses its potential.

How ready are journalists to cover the big humanitarian stories?

An opinion piece by Kate Wright, co-author of The State of Humanitarian Journalism

Should Save the Children play a key role in setting up a new worldwide register of suspected sex offenders, whilst being investigated by the charities Commission for its own failure to deal with allegations of sexual misconduct? Are feminist whistle-blowers being marginalised from debates about how sexual harassment, abuse and exploitation are tackled? Will the steps suggested at DFID’s recent Safeguarding Summit actually work?

Whilst these internal rows grind on, the suffering of others grows much, much worse. The UN has warned that in Yemen the worst famine in a hundred years is imminent, if Saudi’s blockade does not cease. But Yemen is not an isolated case: 80% of the world’s humanitarian needs are already driven by conflict.

Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report saying that we have only a few years to ward off catastrophic levels of global warming. If we don’t cut carbon emissions drastically, there will be far more droughts, hurricanes and floods. These will hit the poorest hardest: feeding a vicious cycle of fragility, competition over resources, and conflict. Little has improved, it seems, since the first World Humanitarian Summit was held two years ago.

If we are to respond to these issues effectively, we need to have information about what’s going on. Policy-makers and other audiences need to understand the causes of the issues, and the range of solutions on offer. So the question is: how ready are journalists to cover what is coming?

Only a few news outlets regularly report on humanitarian issues

In our industry report, The State of Humanitarian Journalism, we explain some of the key results of a global, four year research project. The main finding is that only a very small number of news outlets produce regular, original reporting of humanitarian issues. With the exception of The Washington Post, commercial news outlets do not report on humanitarian issues outside of ‘emergencies’. Instead, the funding for humanitarian reporting is largely concentrated in the hands of two sets of powerful actors: states and private foundations.

State-funded international broadcasters, including BBC World Service, Al Jazeera English, CGTN and Voice of America, aren’t as limited by financial concerns as commercial news organisations. But what they can report may be constrained by overt censorship, diplomatic sensitivities or fierce arguments between states, as happened during the blockade of Qatar. Even when states do not directly interfere in the day-to-day running of these news outlets, their strategic priorities tend to shape the geographic spread of reporters, if not actual editorial content.

The other major group of funders are private foundations, which support small, specialist news outlets, like IRIN and the humanitarian news vertical at Thomson Reuters Foundation, as well as blogs like Humanosphere. These foundations have been established by businesses and entrepreneurs, the most prominent of which is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But such forms of funding are unsustainable as we foundations usually provide ‘start-up’ funding, rather than regular running costs. They also tend to invest in humanitarian reporting as a short-term means of delivering other kinds of socio-economic ‘impact’, rather than a worthwhile goal in and of itself. For these reasons, Humanosphere closed in June 2017, and News Deeply had to make deep cuts to its services in September 2018.

Some good news – research shows that audiences are interested

There are two bits of cheering news. The first is that humanitarian reporting is much more varied than many had previously thought. News outlets differ significantly from one another, and there are still important ‘gaps’ which those interested in this work could move forward to fill, including gender reporting and investigative journalism. The second is that Western audiences are far more interested in humanitarian news than editors have hitherto believed. In the Aid Attitudes Tracker survey spanning audiences in 4 countries, ‘humanitarian disasters’ was actually found to be the most popular category of international news—not the least.

Read Full Report

Dear journalists, we want to be more honest with you. For starters, don’t call us charities

An opinion piece By Simon O’Connell, Executive Director, Mercy Corps.

Yumbe is about as far north and west in Uganda as it is possible to go. A dozen years ago I worked in this part of Africa, and I went back there recently. Much has changed. Four years of civil war in neighbouring South Sudan has created two million refugees, half of whom have crossed into Uganda. They are trying to rebuild their lives among Ugandan communities that are themselves struggling against poverty.

But where you might expect to see strife, we are seeing how the combination of South Sudanese and Ugandans is sparking enterprise and beginning to drive growth. Spending and investment by refugees is supporting more businesses, and the increased economic activity is bringing opportunities to a part of Uganda that was previously remote and cut off from significant markets.

To facilitate this, organisations like mine, Mercy Corps, are promoting land sharing between refugees and host communities, subsidising seed purchases from local agro-dealers, improving agro-dealers’ ability to access quality seeds from national companies, and working to attract produce trading companies to the area. We are working with the private sector, local government and other aid organisations to support not just individual people, but the market systems on which they rely and can build for the future.

Elsewhere around the world, we have run reinsurance programmes, set up dozens of micro-finance initiatives, established the first tech start-up incubator and accelerator in Gaza, and formed a public private partnership to provide a water system for over a million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By working through markets, the scale of impact is enormous.

Don’t call us a charity

But we have a problem: traditionally, our work has been labelled ‘charity’, a word that means ‘an organisation set up to provide help and raise money for those in need’ or ‘the voluntary giving of help, typically in the form of money, to those in need’. It is a word that has also become synonymous with emergency relief and ‘handouts’.

In Yumbe and elsewhere, though, Mercy Corps and others are engaged in intricate social and economic activity to help deliver lasting change. To describe this work as ‘charity’ doesn’t really cut it. But, we largely have ourselves to blame. Our ability to communicate what we do has been found wanting. When it comes to aid, we think that the public and politicians have little appetite for complexity or potential failures. So we portray ourselves as simple ‘charities’ – raising money to give to the needy – not the complicated agents of social change that we actually aspire to be.

This has consequences for the relationship between aid agencies and the media – a relationship that has increasingly resembled a battlefield. Few things set journalists going like the scent of inconsistency and hypocrisy – and by presenting ourselves as we have, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have made themselves a target. In turn, we have responded to media attacks by becoming increasingly wary and defensive.

There are other consequences, too. The Edelman Trust Barometer – a survey of more than 33,000 respondents – earlier this year found that NGOs are viewed negatively or neutrally in 21 of the 28 countries surveyed. In the UK, trust in NGOs stood at only 46%. Negative stories about aid continue to eat away at how our sector is perceived.

This should come as no surprise. If we present ourselves as ‘charities’, it is little wonder the media criticise us and people mistrust us when they see us doing things they don’t expect. If we want to regain trust we need to communicate better what we do, and what the work of modern NGOs actually involves. But we can’t do that without the media. It is through the media that the world is represented and our role in helping to shape it. We in the NGO sector need to find a way to work with the media without metaphorically coming to blows.

In a decline in trust, NGOs and the media have some common ground. The Edelman Trust Barometer also found that media are trusted less than both businesses and government, the first time that has happened in the survey’s 18-year history. This is mostly driven by the growth of ‘fake news’ and the public’s acknowledgement that they find it difficult to tell fact from fiction. Within this general crisis of trust, the media are suffering too.

A new relationship between the media and NGOs

So, is it time to take a different view of the relationship between NGOs and the media? Instead of frequently behaving as if we are on opposite sides, we could instead view ourselves as mutually supportive – both important parts of a functioning democratic society. A strong and independent press is an essential counterbalance to government and the private sector. So is a range of non-governmental organisations, backed up by a commitment to freedom of speech. Between us, NGOs and the media are vital for building social capital, trust and shared values that help hold society together.

If we could see the relationship between aid agencies and the media in that way, some real changes might be possible. Organisations like mine should do more to avoid presenting ourselves simplistically as ‘charities’, but instead take responsibility for representing the complexity of the challenges we seek to solve and the diversity of our work. No-one knows better than we do that the aid sector is not perfect. We should commit to increased transparency in explaining the realities of what we do.

In turn, more media organisations should stop viewing aid agencies simply as a target for exposing hypocrisy and scandal. That does not mean the media should stop looking critically at what aid agencies are doing but, with the straw man of ‘simple charity’ removed, they should commit to exploring the realities of aid work objectively.

If we can realise this shift in thinking not only would it benefit communities here in the UK and abroad. It would also go some way to addressing our common problem – by restoring trust in all of us.

An edited version of this piece first appeared on Thomson Reuters News

Follow Simon on Twitter at @sioconnell1

Find out more about Mercy Corps’ work promoting land sharing between refugees and host communities (PDF)

What is an IBT briefing?

So what happens at an IBT briefing? We hold these events regularly so that our members can meet face to face with media decision makers.

Our last briefing was with Liz Corbin, Head of News at BBC World News. The BBC is, of course, a leading broadcaster when it comes to international content so we were all keen to hear how decisions are taken about which stories to cover.

BBC World News is the BBC’s most watched TV channel with a global audience of more than 100 million, so its news coverage is truly global, and much more varied that what we see on the BBC here in the UK.

Knowing the audience

Liz and her colleagues are very aware of who is watching the channel at any given time and the news agenda reflects this. For example, The Briefing at 5am is aimed at viewers in Europe and Africa; GMT at noon is aimed at Asia/Pacific and the US East coast.

Every story goes through a key test of ‘will this interest our audience?’ So if you’re pitching to Liz have that thought upper most in your mind. Like all news editors, she wants to know what’s new about a story and why it is relevant now.

One of the goals of the channel is to place global events in context and to explain wider trends to its audience.

Advice on pitching a story

Much of the briefing covered practical points such as how to pitch ideas to Liz; which stories worked best for her channel; who was watching and examples of successful collaborations with NGOs.

Liz encouraged IBT members to make contact with BBC bureaux in the countries in which they operated. When she ran the BBC team in Singapore, she had several key contacts amongst local NGOs and kept in regular touch with them.

Liz also told us about the BBC’s 50-50 policy – its target that half of all experts appearing on news programmes should be female by 2020.

This was having a big effect on day to day decisions so if you are suggesting an expert to appear on one of her shows you’ll have far more chance if it’s a woman.

When academics first started measuring these figures some BBC programmes such as Today had a ration of 6 to 1.

NGOs and safeguarding

The BBC is such an influential broadcaster so how it tells stories about the developing world matter – and how it reports on the work of aid agencies.

These agencies have come under criticism for their handling of safeguarding, with coverage over the last few months focusing on Oxfam, then Save the Children and, most recently, MSF.

BBC World News covered the revelations about MSF, since they originated with the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show. An important question we wanted Liz to answer was how far this coverage had changed her view of NGOs.

It was reassuring to hear that her views hadn’t changed. Safeguarding was an issue for all sectors of society, she told us, therefore it was no surprise that NGOs were affected.

IBT briefings

IBT briefings are open to all our members and free to attend. If you’re interested in joining IBT take a look at our membership page or get in touch mark@ibt.org.uk.

Briefing Notes: BBC World News

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The Blue Planet Effect

How good is TV coverage of the environment? Blue Planet II showed us the damage plastics are doing to our oceans. Hugh’s War on Waste highlighted waste from coffee cups that could not be recycled, vegetables grown by farmers but rejected by supermarkets and excess packaging from suppliers like Amazon. But how could TV do better? How can it help us as consumers to understand the environmental impact of decisions we take? How can it raise awareness of climate change?

At this year’s Sheffield Documentary Festival, there was much talk of ‘the Blue Planet effect.’ The prominence with which the David Attenborough fronted series featured plastic shocked many viewers into action. One of those shocked viewers was reportedly Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary.

It was interesting to hear in Sheffield from Tom McDonald, the BBC executive who commissioned Blue Planet II. When the series was first commissioned there was no plan to feature plastic. It was only when filming began and the film crews encountered so much plastic in the oceans that the producers decided this had to be a major theme of the series.

The way the audience responded to the programme, Tom McDonald told delegates at Sheffield, has given the BBC the confidence to commission more programmes that look at our impact on the environment. There will be more on plastics and these shows will run in prime time on BBC1. And there will be a new one-off BBC1 programme fronted by Stacey Dooley that looks at the impact on the environment of the clothes we buy.

At IBT, we have a longstanding interest in environmental issues and we welcome these new moves by the BBC. We’d like to see the other principal public service broadcasters, ITV and Channel 4, follow the BBC’s lead.

At ITV this is certainly taking place with the popular soap, Emmerdale, featuring characters who use recyclable cups and bags, drive electric vehicles and talk about environmental issues, according to Philip Holdgate, project lead of ITV’s Production Green Team. As Holdgate rightly says, this is a powerful tool to normalise sustainable behaviour as Emmerdale reaches 7 million viewers every night on ITV.

But more and better TV coverage of the environment is urgent

The major environmental challenge facing us is climate change. And it’s urgent. At Paris in December 2015, global leaders committed themselves to big reductions in carbon emissions with the goal of reducing global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees. If this is to be achieved we need to make huge changes in our behaviour.

But there is little popular understanding in the UK of what changes individuals can make to reduce their own carbon emissions. When we have held events with producers and broadcasters, we’ve found that many of them admit to ignorance on this subject.

Television has the ability to reach mass audiences and to contribute to important changes in behaviour. Blue Planet II is an example of this and so is Hugh’s War On Waste, another BBC1 show. In this series, the chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall focused on three issues: non-recyclable coffee cups; food waste on farms due to supermarkets rejecting perfectly good ‘wonky’ vegetables because they were the wrong size or shape; and excess packaging by companies like Amazon.

War On Waste was a great show because it put itself in the position of the viewer – it didn’t lecture or talk down – and it focused on practical steps that viewers could take.

So how could TV do better?

If we look at climate change and how best to tackle it, there are three priority areas: transport, energy use and agriculture. These are the areas of life responsible for the most greenhouse gas emissions.

We need popular television that looks at the environmental impact of transport, flying, car travel and electric cars.

TV should be doing more on the home – heating, insulation, energy efficient appliances, solar power, thermostats, smart meters. We do have programmes on homes and house building – like Grand Designs – but it’s rare for them to touch on these issues.

The third major contributor is agriculture which accounts for 20% of emissions. We need to look at what we eat, where the food comes from, its carbon footprint and the impact of food waste on the environment.  TV has plenty of very good food shows – like Food Unwrapped on Channel 4 – but they don’t look at the carbon footprint of food.

We need more shows that help us to think about our role as consumers and the impact of the decisions that we take. I recognise that this is challenging. The tone needs to be right – and it’s hard to achieve, but Hugh’s War On Waste demonstrates that it can be done successfully in prime time. We need the creatives and the commissioners to work harder to get these issues into the mainstream.

June 2018 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s June newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry. (more…)

Briefing Notes: HuffPost

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The Future Of Children’s TV Debate

Below are the notes from the recent APPG for Children’s Media and The Arts debating the Future Of Children’s TV Debate, 16 May 2018.

Download The Future Of Children’s TV Debate notes PDF version

Chair’s welcome

Julie Elliott MP welcomed the audience of 70, stating that this debate was timely, coming at a crucial point in time for kids’ media. She then invited Sophie Chalk from IBT to chair the debate.

Sophie further set the context with a reminder of Article 17 of the UNCRC:

She said that recent research by Childwise shows that children are terrified by international events as they see them in alarmist news and on social media and remarked that children need events to be explained so children are not scared by the world they’re growing up in but able to engage with it.

Simon Terrington – OFCOM

Simon was unable to talk about Ofcom’s ongoing inquiry, beyond what is already in the public domain or to say that the intention is and are on track to publish sometime July-Sept. He did however use Ofcom’s research publication Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes 2017 to set the market context:

Older kids especially are watching less linear TV but even so that averages at 11.9 hours a week so linear TV still plays a huge role in children’s lives. They are watching TV but on other devices, rather than the main TV set.

The reason kids watch content is mainly to make them laugh and/or relax but even so 48% kids want content that ‘makes you think’. Where they source such content was enlightening: 61% go to YouTube to make them laugh/relax, and 54% going there for content that made them think. The BBC scored better for content that made them think or discuss topics but less so for content that made them laugh.

54% of 3-4 year olds are watching YouTube, mainly global pre-school brands and music.

Simon stated that Ofcom understands that Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) content however is not just about what kids want, but also about what they need. He stated the importance of Ofcom’s Public Service Content objectives.

The kind of news that 12-15 year olds are interested in tends to be music, celebrity, sport but 28% were also interested in serious topics (current affairs etc) and when asked to state their top three news interests, half of the teenagers asked had serious topics in their top three, which is encouraging. But there is clearly a need to find ways to draw in the other half to be interested in the wider world.

35% 8-11 year olds don’t think there is enough content that is specifically about kids like them (regional, diverse etc). Ofcom hopes that C4’s proposed move away from London will address this.

As a news source, TV is still the most trusted. Children may get news from social media and online but they will check it out with parents and against the TV because they don’t trust it. 73% of 12-15 year olds are aware of fake news.

View Simon Terrington’s presentation slides (pdf)

Cheryl Taylor Head of Content, BBC Children’s

Cheryl screened a short taster from some of the documentaries, dramas and animations that explore the world for kids (My Life, Go Jetters etc). She stated the intention in most programmes was to show that kids of the world are the same, despite their differences. She said that making such programming was highly skilled and trained to get it right so that nothing is ever mawkish or exploitative but rather celebrates the children’s whose stories they are telling. She welcomed plurality but said content makers needed to give an extraordinary attention to detail if it is to serve its audience well.

Asked if international stories are less palatable to kids, Cheryl stated that they do just as well with the child viewer as domestic content. The My Life documentary strand is often in the Top 40 shows on the iPlayer. Producers do not need to fear making documentaries for kids.

Nicky Cox- First News, Unicef UK Advisor

With children surrounded by 24/7 news channels, social media etc she ignored the naysayers and established the newspaper, First News, now also online, and continues to have a daily interaction with kids.

She said the average age for children to get their first mobile phone is now 71/2 years, so the world is very much at the fingertips of young kids. But this has led to an overload of information about world events and a desperately alarming rise in anxiety and mental health problems. Kids are worried by news and fake news because of the stuff they have read or seen online. There is a big need for truthful content that empowers kids, but we are falling short of delivering this. She said that kids are 27% of the world’s population, but 100% of the future.

Children watch 15 hours of online video a week. For ten year olds this is a mix of things like social gaming, and celebrity stories on snap chat. These things help form the morals and values of the children watching: why are we leaving this formation of values to chance?

To counter this, First News makes a daily video for Sky News as well as 2 minute Explainer videos under the banner Fresh Start Media. These have been well received and there is clearly a big thirst for informative and popular content. But currently the only PSB broadcaster to be doing any of this sort of content is BBC with strands such as My Life.

Nicky has been making documentary content for My Life with UNICEF, exploring topics such as the Calais ‘Jungle’. But rather than the usual alarmist tone, these documentaries highlight the positive stories. Editors need to make better choices and tell positive stories. Nicky called for a quota: there should be a minimum percentage requirement for broadcasters to children to show programming about the wider world. Currently ITV has no target and C4 says such content is financially not viable. But our children need it.

Professor Jeanette Steemers

From her work exploring the business end of children’s content, Jeanette stated that the key problems that need to be solved are Funding and Distribution.

She stated that the best content SHOWS diversity rather than just naming it.

From her studies with Public Service Broadcasters overseas, she warned that if there is no content about the wider world, it creates a vacuum in kids’ lives. PSBs are the only people making this content. There are no such broadcasters in the Middle East so parents rely on religious broadcasters, which lays children open to indoctrination rather than accurate and unbiased information. Kids are not born as citizens but need access to content that helps them become citizens.

We must believe that good content will have an impact. It takes a long time but research round the world shows that good content helps to shape how kids think about and engage with the world. She called on Ofcom to extend its research beyond what children are watching to WHY they watch what they watch.

With so much content now accessed online, there is a real issue about the lack of regulation and compliance with the online platforms. With evidence for example of  companies rejecting black hands for unboxing videos, there is a lot of material that simply wouldn’t be allowed on traditional channels. Such unchallenged racism creates discriminatory attitudes that will manifest in the viewers later.

Jeanette dismissed the argument that children only want entertainment.  What we should be asking ourselves is ‘how can we help to make informed citizens?’ She hoped that the DCMS’ contestable fund could help go towards tackling the distribution and discoverability issues. There has been much talk of an online platform. The recent discussions between PSBs to create a streaming service to rival Netflix might be a solution. Ofcom needs to find a way to encourage the commercial PSBs to do a bit more and also online companies like Facebook must step up.

But for any real change, policy needs to step away from prohibition and find ways to be positive. Other territories are facing the same issues.  Countries like Denmark and Germany have very good public service broadcasters and they are hooking up with education organisations and film institutes for example to fund and distribute content. The British Film Institute could do more to help distribution. DCMS could connect with Education to make good quality content.

Questions

Adam Minns COBA stated that non-PSBs (i.e. Sky, Nickelodeon, Disney) invested £23m last year in first run Public Service type content in UK (Ocean Rescue, Art Attack). It’s not going to replace the BBC but these broadcasters are still highly regulated and this was their own money. He asked that in light of this investment, the current EPG positions were critical, for children to discover this content, and keep the investment financially viable.

Colette Bowe VLV asked how do people discover content online especially? There needs to be support and help to find the good stuff.

Kate O’Connor Animation UK said that there needs to be a combination of options: quotas + specialist platforms etc. She asked why do we fear setting quotas for commercial channels?

In response:

Simon – Navigation is critical to finding content. Parents tend to curate preschool but older children begin to choose for themselves or via friends. Prominence on the EPG is critical as are the links on digital platforms.

Nicky – when she proposed First News, it was ridiculed but now it has 2.2million readers. She wants to build an online safe channel. Her attitude from her experience with the print version is “build it and they will come.”

Jeanette – the reality is that children don’t always want the safe stuff. They want to push the boundaries and we mustn’t forget there are many audiences within the kids sector. There is currently not enough research about how platforms work: it looks like they push algorithms rather than public service values. There needs to be transparency. ITV don’t want kids content because its expensive. What can Ofcom do? Jeanette said she had every confidence Ofcom will do the right thing.

Cheryl – parents want content they can trust for their little ones, hence they’ll go direct to CBeebies for example but it is hard to keep up with what older ones are up to. With the connectedness of kids, programme makers are competing with kids creating their own soap opera. CBBC doesn’t post on YouTube because of the age regulations but other people are making money from posting CBBC content there.

Ian Lucas MP – DCMS Select Committee – An issue within Westminster is that things tend to get compartmentalised. It would be good to connect with All Party Groups for countries to get the perspectives of children abroad. He said that, like his own constituency, every constituency has talent to produce content and this potential should be mined. There needs to be more working together for funding: tapping into international development budgets for example. C4’s regional agenda talks about having a strong focus on younger audiences. The case needs to be made that C4 needs to capture its audience early. He also suggested that we need to get politicians to talk to broadcasters.

Beryl Richards, European Broadcasting Union. Broadcasters need to think more internationally: coming together with PSBs overseas to achieve the common aims on a platform. Ofcom regulates British broadcasters but platforms are international. Can we make international companies do more?

Karen Merkel, UNESCO – UK is part of the Creative Cities Programme with Bristol and Bradford working on media literacy. Not simply the critical theory but practical aspects: taking serious film makers into schools. It has had a serendipitous positive impact on the kids wider attainment of literacy and numeracy etc but focussing on the creative processes and cultural perspective has also resulted in young citizens who can tell their own stories. There needs to be a shift in the Education agenda.

How can we make the likes of Google take more responsibility and do more? Shame them! There is mounting public pressure that they have responsibilities but we mustn’t be too censorious. Kids like to open Pandora’s box but the sheer volume of content means that platforms are slow. That said, surely algorithms can be changed?

Simon agreed that media literacy, with kids creating as well as consuming content is key and Ofcom will think more about this and the need to invest more, again.

Sophie stated that IBT are campaigning for more media literacy and calling upon DDCMS to reinstate funding that was previously cut.

Cary Bazalgette – Schools have a role to play in introducing kids to other art forms but not film. Why not? This is a wasted chance.

Mark Galloway, IBT – asked Cheryl what plans do BBC have for future with brands such as My Life or Where in the World?  – Cheryl stated they now have a great library of content but need to grow more for 12-16 year olds. There are plans to make stuff that is for iPlayer only (where they’re watching) but they are only assessed on their delivery of their quotas by Ofcom for their two broadcast channels rather than online. They need some flexibility to spread money to other platforms without impacting on the hours required of them by Ofcom.

SUMMING UP – Sophie Chalk

• Public service content needs discoverability on all platforms and needs to be actively promoted by its broadcasters.
• There need to be incentives for commercial broadcasters to commit to children’s content because of their commercial motivation.
• Children need a SAFE SPACE online.
• Two important Inquiries to follow/submit to:
  • DCMS Select committee into Fake News
  • Lords Communications Committee into Regulation of the Internet.

May 2018 Newsletter

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April 2018 Newsletter

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Children’s TV – crucial decisions ahead

The future of children’s TV in the UK is under the spotlight and crucial decisions made in the next few months will have a serious impact on what children are able to watch on television.

• Ofcom is considering how to ensure children have enough public service content to watch and may introduce quotas on the commercial public service broadcasters to provide it
• A new fund will be set up to help finance UK made children’s content – we want to see it prioritise international stories

Why is international content important for children?

For IBT members, engaging children, even as young as pre-schoolers, with the world outside the UK is essential if they are to grow up with a rounded understanding of how the world works and their place in it. IBT believes children need access to information about the lives and cultures of people in other countries and television has a vital role to play in providing this.

Recent research by Childwise showed that one in three British children aged nine to 16 said they were more worried about conflict in the world than anything else.

While many children are now watching video online, TV is still crucial because, unlike online, it is regulated to protect us from harmful content and has a statutory duty to be impartial and accurate. This is more important now than ever with the rise of fake news, identified in IBT’s recent report, Faking It – fake news and how it impacts on the charity sector.

For the past 15 years the quantity of TV programmes for children in the UK has declined steadily after quotas for the non-BBC public service channels (ITV, C4, Channel 5) were dropped. Now, most new content produced for children in the UK is broadcast by the BBC and the BBC can’t deliver enough content on its own. There are lots of pay TV channels for children but these mostly show US imports and don’t provide British kids with information relevant to their lives in the UK.

A wealth of research indicates that high quality programming can have a positive effect on children’s development and stimulate their interest in the world around them. This has always been a key element of the public value behind programmes like Blue Peter, Newsround, Magpie, Rainbow and How!

The list of entertaining, informative shows in the archives is a long one, but the list of such programmes currently being broadcast is much shorter. Newsround still plays a hugely important role but Blue Peter, while it runs excellent campaigns on sustainability and provides engaging science content, is largely domestic. International episodes of My Life on CBBC and the recent CBeebies series Where in the World are notable, but they are not the norm.

IBT is calling for an increase in international content aimed at children

We want more content like Where in the World so that our children grow up aware of what is happening in the wider world and become engaged global citizens.

IBT is calling for more content for British children on TV which provides them with a window on the wider world, explaining different cultures, putting international events into context and providing a rounded understanding of where we fit in the scheme of things.

In December the government announced the launch of a £60 million fund for the production of kids’ content for UK TV channels and Ofcom is considering whether to introduce extra regulation to increase the amount of children’s content on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5. IBT is calling for the Contestable Fund to prioritise international content for children and has supported the introduction of extra quotas for the commercial public service channels to provide more content for children.

If you wish to support our campaign please get in touch.

Sophie Chalk, IBT Advocacy Consultant

Briefing Notes: The Economist

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March 2018 Newsletter

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Briefing Notes: ITV News

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Briefing Notes: Fake news and how it impacts on the charity sector

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Fake news and its impact on the charity sector

The Oxfam scandal has transformed the environment for international NGOs. They are under much more pressure than ever before to be as open and transparent as possible. The speed with which stories spread online demands immediate response. But what happens when the stories are false?

How should NGOs respond to fake news?

This is one of the issues considered in our new report, Faking It – fake news and how it impacts on the charity sector. The report finds that charities are struggling to cope with the impact of fake news. Both Save the Children and MSF have been the subject of fake news, falsely accused of colluding with people traffickers as they conduct rescue efforts in the Mediterranean.

The report quotes Sean Ryan, Director of Media at Save the Children as saying:

“In the Mediterranean, our search and rescue operations have been falsely accused of colluding with traffickers. It started as a report in the Italian media and then Defend Europe, the far right group, hired their own boat to try and stop what we were doing. We had to fight this propaganda without any resources. We just had to keep repeating that we only worked with the Italian coastguard.”

MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) have come under similar attack. Their head of press, Gemma Gillie, is deeply concerned about the impact of fake news on their reputation:

“Fake news delegitimises MSF and criminalises the vulnerable which in turn facilitates anti-immigration policies.”

Much has been written about fake news but Faking It is the first report that has looked specifically at the charity sector. Its findings are deeply worrying and illustrate how life has become much more difficult for charities, particularly those involved in international development. In an increasingly strident online environment, it’s harder for charities to be heard. It’s also easier for them to fall victim to false accusations, which often originate online but gain traction through mainstream media.

The report cites one example of trolling in which Girish Menon, the highly regarded CEO of ActionAid was falsely accused of being an ISIS agent. In Girish’s own words:

“We discovered that the message originated from a fake news site hosted in the US. In the heat of the moment there’s no analysis of what’s fake or not. If it had been picked up by other media what would we do? There are only so many times you can issue a rebuttal. Reputations are so brittle, what would our supporters think? And of course ActionAid works in many countries that have an ISIS footprint.”

5 actions that charities can take

• Fake news and misinformation about your work should be monitored and challenged
• Key staff should be trained in verification methods so that information coming from a charity is always carefully scrutinised
• Maintaining and rebuilding public trust should be a key pillar of any communications strategy
• Invest in relationships with trusted media outlets to help reinforce and amplify messaging

Download the Faking it: Fake News and How it Impacts on the Charity Sector report

February 2018 newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s February newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry. (more…)

Briefing Notes: Networking breakfast with Unreported World

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January 2018 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s January newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry. (more…)

IBT announces its new international TV award

Dear IBT members,

We need your help. Today we are launching the IBT award for the outstanding international television programme of 2017 and we need you to nominate your favourite programmes.

Despite the growth of social media, television remains hugely important as a way bringing global issues to mainstream audiences.

Who can be in any doubt as to the influence of television on the public – and even on some hard to reach politicians? If you read The Times today you will have seen its report that Secretary of State for the Environment, Michael Gove, is now a passionate advocate of tackling plastics pollution, having watched the final episode of Blue Planet 2 and, according to the newspaper, been ‘affected’ by what he saw. Congratulations must go of course to Sir David Attenborough and the team behind this amazing series.

What’s your favourite international TV programme?

No one can be unaware of Blue Planet but of course there is much television that goes uncelebrated. That’s why we are launching this award. A shortlist will be drawn up based on nominations received by IBT members, so please get in touch and tell me your favourite international programmes from 2017. To be eligible a programme must have an international theme and have been broadcast on radio or television, in the UK, in the calendar year 2017.

We are running this award in conjunction with VLV (Voice of the Listener and Viewer), the influential audience group. It will be presented at a special awards ceremony in the spring.

Of course there are many other TV awards – the BAFTAs, RTS, Grierson, Rory Peck, Amnesty and One World. So why a new award? There’s one simple reason. These awards are all judged by media professionals. The IBT award is different as it will be nominated exclusively by our members, who will have a very different set of priorities.

So let me take a personal look at some of the international programmes that have stood out in 2017. It’s been a good year for the traditional presenter-led format, with memorable examples such as The Ganges with Sue Perkins, Russia with Simon Reeve, Joanna Lumley’s India, Reggie Yates Extreme Russia and Stacey Dooley Investigates. The BBC’s Partition season had some memorable shows, notably My Family, Partition and Me and Dangerous Borders – A Journey Across India and Pakistan.

All the programmes I’ve mentioned so far come from the BBC or ITV. Channel 4 nowadays broadcasts far fewer international programmes, but what it does is always worth watching. This year there was The Fight for Mosul and Syria’s Disappeared: the Case Against Assad. And of course the inimitable Unreported World which in 2017 took us to so many countries that would otherwise not feature on television at all – Peru, Mexico, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Samoa, to name just a few.

When you review this list, it does seem that TV commissioners have settled very much on the presenter-led format. It’s a shame that there is not more experimentation. A few years ago we had Welcome to Rio on BBC2 and The Tribe on Channel 4. There is, however, one important exception. Keo, the producers of Welcome to Rio, brought us Exodus – Our Journey Continues. There is so much coverage of refugees in the media that we think we know all there is to know, but Exodus brings the human drama into our living rooms in a way that keeps you awake at night. It’s another reminder, along with Blue Planet, that television has a huge impact on the way we see the world.

We hope the IBT award will become a regular fixture and will encourage broadcasters to commission more high quality international content. This will only happen if you, our members, nominate your favourite programmes now. There’s no nomination form, just email me with your suggestions. The closing date for nominations is January 14, 2018.

Mark Galloway, IBT Director

December 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s December newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.

View the latest IBT_Newsletter in PDF format.

This month’s briefing with the Sunday papers

Last month we heard from four newspaper executives who gave a clear idea of the sort of stories they were looking for and the best way to pitch to them. The speakers were Kate Mansey from the Mail on Sunday, Dominic Herbert from The Sunday Mirror, Joe Shute from The Telegraph and Tracy McVeigh from The Observer. Tracy now runs Guardian Development and spoke about some of changes she is planning for the site. All encouraged the IBT members present to get in touch with their ideas. You can find a more detailed note on what was said with contact details of the speakers on the members’ page of the IBT website. We shot a short interview afterwards with Joe who gave some useful advice.

Joe recently wrote a story for Telegraph Magazine on WWF’s campaign to save the tiger.

Digital leadership workshop

Later this month we will be running our first digital leadership workshop, which will explore some of the challenges of achieving digital change across an organization. Zoe Amar, who specializes in digital leadership in the NGO sector, will lead the workshop, which will include a detailed case study from an international NGO. This session is suitable for heads of digital or others who wish to know more about how to achieve digital change. It will take place from 9am to 2pm on Thursday December 14th at the IBT offices. If you’d like to attend, please register now via the IBT website.

Social media refresher

In January, we’ll be back with our popular social media refresher. Martin Carter will take us through the latest trends across the main social media platforms – Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter – and he’ll show us examples of best practice from a range of NGOs. This event is designed for media officers and others who are regular users of one or more of these platforms. Last time we ran this session we received excellent feedback. The session will run from 9-2 on Thursday January 18 2018. Lunch will be included. This is a free event for IBT members. Do share the details with anyone in your organization who you think might be interested. If you’d like to attend, you can register now via the IBT website.

Help us select the outstanding international TV or radio programme of 2017

Later this month we will be launching a new award for the best international TV or radio programme broadcast in the UK, to be nominated by IBT members. We are running the award in conjunction with VLV (the Voice of the Listener and Viewer) the influential pressure group that represents the interests of audiences. Of course there are other awards that recognize outstanding media coverage of global issues but this is different as all the programmes that are shortlisted for the award will be nominated by IBT members. This is very much our own award which we hope you will support by nominating your favourite programmes. To do so, just get in touch with us via email, Twitter or Facebook. We will be announcing more details of the award later this month.

Changes at ITV News

ITV News is expanding its presence online with three new shows hosted by some of its top presenters. Robert Peston will host Now What? Julie Etchingham will interview leading women from all walks of life in Ask A Woman. And Rageh Omaar will host a discussion show called Young, British and Muslim.

ITV commits to strengthening its news offer

The changes at ITV News are part of a wider commitment by ITV to public service broadcasting. Sir Peter Bazalgette, ITV’s Executive Chairman, spoke about this at the recent VLV conference and in an article for The Guardian. He argued that there is a crisis of trust in the public sphere so news from trusted sources is more important than ever. Recent Ofcom research shows that audiences have a high level of trust in news from the public service broadcasters – the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Read more from Sir Peter here.

New research on children’s TV viewing habits

The media regulator, Ofcom, has published its annual survey of children’s media use. If you are targeting children and want an up to date picture of how they use media, then this is a useful resource. Interestingly, television remains an important source of news for children – and is more widely trusted than social media. Download the survey report (pdf).

The Ofcom research found that many children feel there is not enough content on television that reflects their lives. This concern was addressed recently by Alice Webb, the head of children’s at the BBC, in an interview with The Guardian. She said the BBC is investing extra money to produce British made children’s content.

New research on media coverage of refugees

The Refugee Reporting project has published new research that looks at media representation of refugees and migrants in Europe. The research was carried out in seven European countries including the UK. The project is run by WACC (the World Association for Christian Communication) and CCME (the Churches’ Commission for Migrants in Europe). The researchers found that most stories focused on the issues and failed to give a voice to individual refugees or migrants. Where individuals did feature they were seen as refugees or migrants rather than as people who had a previous life and a job. Some groups, particularly women, were underrepresented. The report includes practical recommendations for media and civil society organisations. An executive summary can be seen here (pdf).

What do Daily Mail readers really think about UK aid?

The audience insight agency, Humankind Research, has been running focus groups with Daily Mail readers to find out what they really think about aid and to offer some suggestions for how NGOs can be more effective in reaching these audiences. It appears that they view NGOs as part of the establishment, and that those NGOs who can present themselves as being ‘on their side’ have a better chance of being viewed positively. They want to be sure that the money they give to charity is being well used and is genuinely making a difference. There is a feeling of distance, that the money is being spent far away in a way that gives them little control. Humankind’s conclusion is that emotion is the key way forward, by appealing to shared values.  This research will be discussed at the Bond conference in February.

What is the editorial agenda of RT?

If you’ve been wondering what the thinking behind RT, formerly Russia Today, is then it’s worth taking a look at this article by Guardian reporter Tim Dowling who watched the channel for a week.

IBT research on fake news and how to spot fake pictures

Many of you have helped us gather evidence for our new research on fake news, which we will be publishing in January. But if you know of any particular instances where your NGO or another one has been the victim of fake news then please do get in touch. An interesting example of fake news was highlighted recently by BBC online. It identified a fake picture that was appearing on social media purporting to be of the Sinai bombing of a mosque in which more than 200 people lost their lives. The photo was actually 3 years old. The BBC gave some useful advice on how to spot fake photos.

Global Health Film Festival, December 8 and 9

The Global Health Film Festival has just published its programme. The festival takes place at the Barbican on Friday and Saturday with extensive screenings and workshops. I’ll be chairing a discussion on Friday afternoon on two important films, The Heart of the Matter and The Life Equation. These films raise questions about the most effective way of spending scarce resources on global health. See the full programme here (pdf).

Best wishes

Mark

IBT’s mission is to use the media to further awareness and understanding of people’s lives in the developing world and the issues which affect them

Briefing Notes: Sunday Newspapers

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Briefing Notes: BuzzFeed UK

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November 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s November newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry. (IBT Newsletter November 2017)

This month’s briefing with the Sunday papers

Later this month we’ll be taking a closer look at four Sunday newspapers, The Mail on Sunday, Sunday Mirror, Sunday Telegraph and Observer, and we’ll hear from key executives who will tell us what they’re looking for and how best to pitch ideas to them. The Sunday papers often feature in depth reporting on global issues and stories so this session should have wide appeal to IBT members. The four speakers will be:

• Vicki Harper, Features Director, Telegraph group
• Dominic Herbert, News Editor, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People
• Kate Mansey, Deputy Features Editor, Mail on Sunday
• Tracy McVeigh, Chief reporter, Observer and Acting Editor, Guardian development site.

We’ll also be asking the speakers to tell us how the Sunday titles work with their daily counterparts and websites. This event will take place from 10-12 on Tuesday November 28th at our offices in Southwark. Places are limited so please book early.

Register for this Sunday newspapers event

Last month’s briefing with BuzzFeed UK

Last month, Alan White, News Editor at BuzzFeed UK spoke to a packed audience and gave us a clear rundown on how the UK operation works and its relationship with colleagues in the US. There’s been a big increase in the number of staff in London since Alan joined and he was clear on the sort of stories that work best for him. Above all, he wants exclusives, but don’t assume that he is only interested in lighter pieces. He’s keen to build the site’s reputation for hard news and investigations, and he urged those present to get to know individual reporters.

Notes on the briefing can be found on the IBT members’ page.

Digital leadership workshop

Next month, we will be running our first digital leadership workshop, which will explore some of the challenges of achieving digital change across an organization. Zoe Amar, who specializes in digital leadership in the NGO sector, will lead the workshop, which will include a detailed case study from an international NGO. This session is suitable for heads of digital or others who wish to know more about how to achieve digital change. It will take place from 9am to 2pm on Thursday December 14th at the IBT offices. The workshop will cover:

• How to assess where your NGO is at with digital
• How to develop a digital strategy and embed it into your organisation
• The challenge of competing against digital native charities – with a digital mindset, thinking like a start up
• The importance of looking at the user experience/journey.
• How to manage risk
• The 7 areas every digital strategy needs to get right
• Case studies of organisations which are excelling in digital
• What success looks like and how to get there
• How charity leaders should use social media – for storytelling, provoking debate, thought leadership, talking to stakeholders, managing a crisis.

New BBC operating licence

Ofcom, the media regulator, has published the new BBC operating licence. We are delighted that this now includes a commitment to international factual programming, as one of the high level objectives. The BBC will have a statutory duty to provide a range of international content beyond news and current affairs. This duty was not made explicit in the draft licence. IBT lobbied for this change which will have important consequences, as Ofcom will now be required to monitor the BBC’s international content. We’d like to thank all our members who wrote to Ofcom to argue for this change, namely ActionAid, CAFOD, Concern, DEC, Sightsavers and UNICEF.

For more details see the OFCOM website

Discussion on authentic storytelling from the global south, November 9th

Next week, One World Media will be hosting an afternoon of discussion on the theme of  ‘authentic storytelling from the global south.’ There will be three separate sessions, all taking place on Thursday November 9th. In one of the sessions, David Lammy, the Labour MP, will be in conversation with Jon Snow. Lammy will be talking about how Africa is represented in the UK media.

Book tickets for this event on the OneWorldMedia website

Sheffield seminar on public attitudes to international development, November 13th

Later this month, the Sheffield Institute for International Development will host a seminar looking at the latest research on public attitudes to international development. Three different pieces of academic research will be presented and debated. The seminar takes place from 3-5pm on Monday November 13th.

See the Eventbrite page to register

Fake News panel debate, November 14th

Later this month Quartz will be co-hosting an event looking at fake news. They’ll be debating the role of algorithms in spreading the news, talking to some of the people developing tools to stop fake news from proliferating and discussing the future of the news business. IBT will be publishing its own report on fake news early next year.

The Quartz event will take place at 6.30pm on Tuesday November 14th.

Regsiter to attend this panel debate

Best wishes

Mark

October 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s October newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry. (Download/Print this Newsletter) (more…)

Briefing Notes: Vice News

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September 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s September newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry. (more…)

August 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s August newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.   (Download/Print this Newsletter)

Next month’s briefing with Vice News
Next month, in our first briefing of the Autumn, we will be hearing from Neil Breakwell, London Bureau Chief of Vice News. Vice News has established a well deserved reputation for reinventing foreign news reporting, with a strong focus on the Middle East and on reaching younger audiences. Neil will talk us through the recent changes at Vice and the best way to pitch stories to him and his colleagues. The briefing takes place at 10am on Wednesday September 27^th at the IBT offices in Southwark. If you’d like to attend, please register via the IBT website.

IBT AGM
Last month we held our AGM. This is a formal occasion during which we report back to our members on our activities over the past year and plans for the future.  Our Trustees concluded that it had been a good year for IBT with our three main strands of activity – lobbying, research and briefings – working well together. They were particularly pleased that several CEOs from our member organisations had written in support of our call for the BBC Charter to be amended to include a stronger commitment to international factual programming. This lobbying campaign was successful and the Charter was amended accordingly.

BBC call to action
Many thanks to all who responded to our recent call to action and wrote to Ofcom to support our demand that international factual content on the BBC should be tagged. Ofcom received letters from eight CEOs from IBT member organisations. This is a fantastic response and adds considerable weight to our call. We will be meeting Ofcom shortly to pursue this further. Our own submission to Ofcom can be found here:
https://ibt.org.uk/lobbying/to-ofcom-consultation-holding-the-bbc-to-account-for-the-delivery-of-its-mission-and-public-purposes-july-2017/

Channel 4’s regional impact
Last month we also made a submission to DCMS which was consulting on plans to move Channel 4 out of London. We have reservations about the move as we feel it will be extremely costly and disruptive and will not necessarily achieve the desired result of increasing regional production. We are also concerned that the Government’s focus on regional production and a wider range of UK voices will detract from Channel 4’s statutory requirement to promote voices from around the world. You can read our submission here:
https://ibt.org.uk/lobbying/to-dcms-on-channel-4s-regional-impact-july-2017/

The BBC World Service
Details have been announced by the BBC of the World Service’s expansion and delivery of 12 new language services, mostly in Africa. This is the largest expansion of the World Service since the 1940s and will be funded by the Foreign Office. This means that in future the World Service will be funded jointly by the licence fee and by an FCO grant. The governance implications of this are not yet clear. As part of its new vision, the World Service’s Director, Fran Unsworth, has spoken of its commitment to solutions-focused journalism – an attempt to move the BBC coverage of Africa in particular away from stories of disaster, conflict and famine. It will be interesting to see how this vision evolves. BBC Africa has announced that some of the extra funding will be used to set up a new investigations unit.

Video First – making an impact
As a follow up to our Video First report, Sophie Chalk has written a blog on the DevCommsLab website giving her top tips for how to achieve impact online:
https://devcommslab.org/blog/top-ten-tips-on-how-to-make-videos-about-international-development-issues-work-online/

Why video is the future of learning for charities
Martin Baker, Chief Executive of Clear Lessons Foundation, has written an interesting think piece for The Guardian, arguing that the voluntary sector needs to do more to harness the power of video for learning. He says that our brains absorb and process information 60,000 faster by video than text. Whether you accept this statistic or not, he makes a persuasive case:
https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2017/jul/21/video-learning-digital-skills-charities

The digital challenge for charities
Zoe Amar has written a thought-provoking article, also for The Guardian, where she examines the challenge of digital for the charity sector. She believes that the sector is responding too slowly to the need for change. Zoe argues that technology is not just about more digital tools and skills but it’s about a fundamental cultural change. She will be running a workshop for us later this year where she’ll be looking in more detail at how NGOs should go about achieving this cultural change. This workshop will be aimed at senior leaders from amongst our membership. If you’re interested in attending please let me know as we would welcome input into the planning the session. Zoe’s article can be found here:
https://amp.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/2017/jul/31/charities-transform-digital-age

Lessons for virtual reality filmmakers
If you’re involved in commissioning or producing a VR video then it’s worth taking a look at a new piece of research commissioned by the BBC. The research looks in detail at the audience response to VR and concludes that VR needs to take audiences on a journey. Experiences for the sake of experiences – without a clear narrative or goal – tend to fall flat with audiences, according to the report’s authors. You can read more in this blog by Tim Fiennes, a market analyst with BBC Audiences:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/c438a2cd-fcd4-42f3-ab69-244d3c579011

The Conservative case for aid
The right wing think tank Policy Exchange has published a new report, Global Britain, Global Challenges – how to make aid more effective. It argues in favour of aid and for the Government’s commitment to 0.7. However, it says that aid can and should be spent more effectively and that ‘the development community should embrace trade and capitalism as vital to reducing poverty and disease.’ In an introduction to the report, the Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson writes that ‘there is a strong centre-right case for putting overseas aid at the centre of a Global Britain.’ You can read the full report here:
https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Global-Britain-Global-Challenges-5th-July.pdf

Best wishes

Mark

July 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s July newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)
 

Last month’s briefing with Sky News

Last month we heard from Matt Rhodes, Senior Planning Producer at Sky News. Matt talked us through the best way to pitch ideas to him and his colleagues and how to contact the interviews team with suggestions for studio guests. International coverage remains a priority, however, it was clear from Matt’s talk that Sky is devoting more resources to the major international stories and there is therefore less space for off agenda features. Their main focus at the moment is the US and the Middle East, particularly Syria and Iraq, but also Yemen and Libya. A detailed note on the briefing can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

IBT AGM

Next week we will be holding our AGM. This is a formal occasion during which we report back to our members on our activities over the past year and plans for the future. The event takes place at 5pm on Thursday July 13^th at the IBT offices. Please let me know if you would like to attend, so that I can send you the meeting papers in advance.

BBC call to action

All IBT members should have received an email from me last week, asking you to write to Ofcom to support our call for international factual content on the BBC to be tagged.  Thank you to all those who kindly offered to write to Ofcom. The deadline for letters is Monday July 17^th. We are happy to help you draft a letter. If you missed the email or would like more information please contact me or IBT’s advocacy consultant, Sophie Chalk, who is leading on this Sophie.chalk@btinternet.com

Save the Children’s new report: The People in the Pictures

Last week Save the Children published The People in the Pictures, an important report which looked closely at the experience of people and communities that have appeared in their communications. The aim was to have a better understanding of how they experienced the image-making process and felt about the way in which their images were used in campaigning, fundraising and other communications. The report makes a number of recommendations, which involve greater recognition of contributors as stakeholders in the image-making process. At last week’s launch event, Save’s CEO, Kevin Watkins, said that they had made a number of changes to their practices to comply with the report’s recommendations. It’s great that Save have published the findings of the report and have provided this stimulus for a sector wide conversation.
http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/resources/online-library/people-pictures

Screening: Sea of Pictures

Later this month the Frontline Club, in collaboration with the Ethical Journalism Network, will screen Sea of Pictures, a documentary which explores how the image of the Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, went viral and looks at the wider issue of how the media use images to tell stories. The screening will be followed by a debate discussing how pictures can impact and shape public discourse and policy, often in ways which are unintended.  The event, chaired by Dorothy Byrne, Channel 4’s Head of News and Current Affairs, takes place at 7pm on Monday July 31^st.
https://www.frontlineclub.com/screening-sea-of-pictures-qa/

Reframing Climate Change

We have been continuing with our reframing climate change project. At last month’s Sheffield Documentary Festival we hosted a short film pitch with The Guardian online and a panel debate in which four leading filmmakers talked about how they had tackled the issue of climate change. Two of the films featured were screened at the festival, Thank You for the Rain and Chasing Coral. Both have now been released in the UK. We also held a brainstorm with the Unreported World team to encourage them to cover more environmental stories. Our next brainstorm will be with Horizon.

Ashden Awards

If you missed last month’s Ashden Awards, it’s worth watching Al Gore’s keynote spech. His new movie An Inconsequential Sequel comes to the UK next month.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAIXqcHQTD0

New website on attitudes to aid

The team behind the Gates-funded Aid Attitudes tracker has launched DevCommsLab, a new website, which aims to make the findings of the tracker more readily available and to stimulate a sector wide debate about the best ways of building public support for aid. https://devcommslab.org/

 Does the Daily Mail’s criticism of aid matter?

In a recent blog, Martin Scott from the University of East Anglia, questions the influence of the press on public attitudes to aid. He makes the point that there has been no significant change in the public’s perception of the effectiveness or wastefulness of UK government spending on aid, in the period 2013-6, despite the Daily Mail’s vociferous anti-aid campaign, launched in 2014, to encourage aid money to be spent on flood victims in the UK.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jun/23/does-the-daily-mails-criticism-of-aid-matter

 New book: Caring in Crisis

Bruna Seu and Shani Orgad have published their new book, Caring in Crisis, which documents why and how people respond (or fail to respond) to humanitarian communication. The book highlights what NGOs seek to achieve in their communications and explores how their approach and hopes match or don’t match what the public wants, thinks and feels about distant suffering. It contains essays from a number of academics and industry professionals.
http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319502588#otherversion=9783319502595

New report on public attitudes to refugees

The ODI and Chatham House have published new research which examines public attitudes to refugees and migrants. The working paper is intended as a primer, outlining current global polling data on public attitudes, and analysing what the literature has to say about the drivers influencing these attitudes.
https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-documents/11600.pdf

Reuters Digital News report 2017

If you’re interested in the changing way in which audiences are consuming news, it’s worth taking a look at the latest Reuters Digital News report which was published last month. This year’s report reveals new insights about digital news consumption based on a YouGov survey of 70,000 online news consumers in 36 countries, including the UK and US. The report focuses on the issues of trust in the era of fake new, changing business models and the role of platforms.
http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/

Screening: Calais Children: A Case to Answer

On 4th July, Sue Clayton is screening her new film, Calais Children: A Case to Answer, which follows some of the many unaccompanied minors forced to leave the Calais ‘Jungle’ refugee camp in October 2016. The screening will take place at Birkbeck, University of London, and will be followed by a Q and A with the filmmaker who will talk about her own brand of social activist filmmaking and discuss the question ‘can films change public policy and the law?’ There will be further screenings later this month (see Campaign below).
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/can-films-change-public-policy-and-the-law-tickets-35199993127
Campaign:   www.calais.gebnet.co.uk

Screening: City of Ghosts

Finally, one of the most powerful documentaries screened at the Sheffield Documentary Festival was City of Ghosts, which focuses on the work of a group of Syrian exiles, who call themselves Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently. They risk their lives to document the atrocities committed by ISIS in their homeland. The film is now on release in the UK and shown on 5th July at the Frontline Club. That screening was followed by a Q and A with the director. You can see the trailer here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NCLFoFwrIw

Best wishes

Mark

June 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s June newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

This month’s briefing with Sky News

This month we’ll be hearing from Dan Williams, Head of International at Sky News. Dan will talk us through the latest changes at Sky and the best way to pitch ideas to him and his team. Sky News has a positive track record of covering off agenda news stories and is a good outlet for IBT members. The briefing will take place at the IBT offices at 10am on Thursday June 29^th. This event was due to take place earlier in the year – those who registered last time do not need to do so again. Others should sign up via the IBT website in the usual way. Any queries, just get in touch. Confirmation emails will go out a few days before the event.

Launch of new IBT report Video first – making an impact

Last month we launched our new research report Video first – making an impact. The report looks at the changing media landscape and the growing importance of video online. It includes lots of practical tips on how NGOs can improve their online video content. The launch took place at Channel 4. Speakers included Daniel Pearl, Channel 4’s deputy head of news and current affairs and Max Gogarty, BBC3’s Executive Editor. Sophie Chalk, the report author, presented a summary of the findings. More details on what the speakers said can be found on the members’ page of our website. The report can be downloaded here:
https://ibt.org.uk/documents/reports/video-first-full.pdf

Social media refresher

Last month we also held our first social media refresher – a free training session for IBT members that gave updates on the four main social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat – and lots of examples of how NGOs were using these platforms. The two trainers were social media specialists Zoe Amar and Martin Carter. The feedback from the event was very positive, so we plan to hold another refresher later in the year for those who were unable to attend this time.

Unreported World

Channel 4’s international current affairs strand, Unreported World, is on the lookout for stories for its Autumn run. They’re particularly interested in ideas from Turkey, Libya and the US. They have a strong interest in environmental stories and are looking at the issue of pollution in China and India. They’re also keen to feature urban life in Africa. Stories need to be distinctive, with a narrative that can be filmed in July-September. If you want to find out more, contact the series editor, Monica Garnsey, at Quicksilver or get in touch with me.

Sheffield Documentary Festival

IBT will be hosting two events at this week’s Sheffield Documentary Festival, as part of our work on climate change. If you’re going, please look out for our sessions. On Monday June 12^th at 4.30pm we’ll be holding a film pitch with The Guardian, with the shortlisted filmmakers pitching their ideas in front of a live audience. The winner will receive development funding and their film will be shown on Guardian online. On Tuesday June 13^th at 10am we’ll be hosting a panel debate with four filmmakers talking about the best way to engage mainstream audiences with the issue of climate change. More information here:
https://sheffdocfest.com/sessions/5405?day=4
https://sheffdocfest.com/sessions/5419?day=5

Al Gore speaking at the Ashden Awards

Next week sees the annual Ashden Awards which celebrate sustainable energy trailblazers. The guest speaker will be former US Vice President and climate change campaigner, Al Gore. The event takes place at the Royal Geographical Society at 7pm on Thursday June 15^th. Tickets are available here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/2017-ashden-awards-ceremony-tickets-31326533505

New CBeebies series Where in the World

Earlier this week CBeebies launched its new documentary series, Where in the World, which features children from around the world. It’s good to see the BBC making  programmes for such a young audience that show how children in other countries lead their lives. This is something IBT has been urging the BBC to do for some time. We hope to hold an event in Parliament later in the year that looks at how children see the wider world and how the media influences children’s views.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/shows/where-in-the-world

One World Media awards

Last night the 29^th annual One World Media Awards took place, presented for the first time by Krishnan Guru-Murthy with a guest appearance by the comedian Shazia Mirza. It was great to see such a wide range of media about the developing world coming from so many different media outlets. There were several notable winners including the superb BBC2 series Exodus which won two awards – Refugee Reporting (sponsored by the British Red Cross) and Television Documentary. Its Executive Producer, Will Anderson, is one of the speakers at our Sheffield DocFest panel. A list of all the winners can be found here:
http://www.oneworldmedia.org.uk/awards/winners/

Best wishes

Mark

Briefing Notes: Video First report

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May 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s May newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

We have two events this month – they are open to all IBT members, and our Report launch is open to the general public as well.  If you’d like to attend then please either let me know or register online.

Launch of new IBT report Video first – making an impact

On Tuesday May 16^th, we will be launching our new research report Video first – making an impact. The launch event will take place at the Channel 4 offices in Horseferry Road. Speakers include Daniel Pearl, Channel 4’s deputy head of news and current affairs, and Max Gogarty, BBC3’s Executive Editor.  Sophie Chalk, the report author, will present a summary of the findings. More details here https://ibt.org.uk/events/ibt-report-launch/

Social media refresher

On Thursday May 25^th we will be running a half day social media training session which will include a refresher on the four main social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. We’ll look at new features and trends and give advice on the capability and uses for each site. The two trainers will be social media specialists Zoe Amar and Martin Carter. This is a free event for IBT members but places are limited. More details here https://ibt.org.uk/events/social-media-refresher/

Last month’s briefing with BBC News online

Last month we heard from Angus Foster, World editor at BBC News online. He talked us through the latest changes at the BBC website and advised on the best way to pitch ideas. His advice was to pitch direct to the regional editors for Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and he gave us their contact details. A detailed note on the briefing can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

More on briefings

After each briefing I produce a note which I circulate to all the attendees to share with colleagues. The note usually includes email addresses for all the key contacts from that organization so it’s a useful way to keep your contacts up to date. Notes for past briefings can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

Climate change film pitch

IBT has launched a competition for the best climate change short documentary proposal. We are running this jointly with The Guardian and Sheffield DocFest. The pitch is open now and the closing date is Tuesday May 9^th. The winning proposal will receive £7,500 of development funding and the opportunity to be screened on Guardian online. If you’re planning to attend DocFest, you can watch the shortlisted filmmakers pitch their ideas in front of an audience at 4.30pm on Monday June 12^th.  More information can be found on the Docfest website.

https://sheffdocfest.com/articles/457-the-guardian-documentary-pitch-in-association-with-ibt

#BiggerBritain campaign

Congratulations to all those involved in the #BiggerBritain campaign urging the Government to reaffirm its commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid. The campaign was successful when Theresa May announced that there would be no change to the commitment in the next Conservative party manifesto. Labour, the LibDems, the SNP and the Greens all remain committed to 0.7.

One World Media awards

Tickets go on sale later this week for the One World Media awards which celebrate the best media coverage of the developing world. The annual awards will take place this year on Tuesday June 6^th at BAFTA in the west end. Shortlisted entries for the TV documentary category include The Exodus: Our Journey to Europe (BBC2), The White Helmets (Netflix) and China: Between Clouds and Dreams (Channel 4). Those shortlisted for the international journalist of the year include Guillermo Galdos (Channel 4 News), Christina Lamb (The Sunday Times) and Ian Panell (BBC News). More information here http://www.oneworldmedia.org.uk/awards/

Best wishes

Mark

Briefing Notes: BBC News Online

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April 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s April newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

This month’s briefing will be with BBC News online

BBC News online has been through a major revamp but it remains without doubt one of the key destinations for audiences wishing to find international content. We are delighted that our next briefing will be with Angus Foster, World editor on BBC News online. Angus will talk us through the changes and the best way to pitch ideas to him and his colleagues. BBC News is often regarded as impenetrable to outsiders so this is a great opportunity for us to get a better understanding of the different points of entry for NGOs wishing to pitch to BBC News. The briefing will take place at 10am on Wednesday April 26^th at the IBT offices in Southwark. You can register in the usual way via the IBT website. Apologies to those who wanted to hear from Dan Williams of Sky News – he is still off sick and we will reschedule this event asap.

Launch of new IBT report Video first – making an impact

Next month we’ll be launching our new research report Video first – making an impact. This report looks at the changing media landscape and focuses on online video – who is watching, where are they watching and what are the key lessons for NGOs wishing to produce their own video content? There has been a huge growth in online video and many social media sites actively promote video rather than text or still images. Media organisations are responding by producing more video content but this remains a major challenge for many NGOs. Our report is designed as a practical guide for IBT members. We will be launching it on the morning of Tuesday May 16^th at the Channel 4 offices in Horseferry Road. Sophie Chalk will present the key findings and there will be a panel discussion with a range of broadcasters and social media experts. Invitations will go out shortly.

Social media training

We will be running a social media training session in May. This is free to all IBT members. It is mainly targeted at media officers but others are welcome too. The session will provide a refresher on the four main social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. It will give an update on new features and trends and give advice on the capability and uses for each. This event is specially targeted at NGOs and we’ll be showing examples of how NGOs have made good use of the different sites. The training session will be run for us by social media specialists Zoe Amar and Martin Carter. If you have any queries about the content just get in touch. It takes place from 9am – 2pm on Thursday May 25^th. Lunch will be provided. Book your place(s) on this site.

Digital advice for charities

Last month, Zoe Amar and David Evans published Charity Digital Skills Report which is a very useful guide on charities and social media. The report argues that a lack of a digital strategy is hampering the progress of many charities. An estimated 50% do not have such a strategy. Many do not see digital as a priority. You can read more by following the hashtag #charitydigireport on Twitter. The full report is here http://report.skillsplatform.org/charitydigitalreportdetail/

Climate change on TV

Channel 4 has announced that it will show a season of programming on climate change to mark Earth Day on April 22^nd. This is the culmination of many conversations that we have had with the channel to encourage them to give more prominence to the issue of climate change. Full details of the season have not yet been announced but it will include Earth from Space, a film from Arrow Media, and Escape to Costa Rica, which follows the writer Gaia Vince as she moves from the UK to a country that is well on the way to achieving carbon neutrality.

Tracking your carbon footprint

The BBC has announced that all TV programming within factual, comedy, drama, entertainment and daytime will have to start tracking their carbon footprints from this month. This is the latest success for the Albert carbon calculator which was developed by the BBC and launched by BAFTA several years ago. The Albert scheme helps to identify carbon hotspots and to inform best practice. It’s great to see the television industry making such a sustained effort to reduce its environmental impact. Several BBC shows have been leading the way on this, notably Casualty, Springwatch, Dragon’s Den and BBC Breakfast. If anyone in the development community is aware of similar initiatives in the sector please let us know as we would be keen to publicise these further.

New BBC regulator

This month marks the beginning of a new era of regulation for the BBC. For the first time in its history it will have an outside regulator, Ofcom. Ofcom has published detailed proposals on how it will regulate the BBC which include a series of targets for the number of hours of news and current affairs which the BBC should produce. IBT will be submitting evidence to Ofcom, arguing that the regulator should also be measuring the total number of hours of international content. In a separate development, the BBC Trust has published its own End of Charter review in which it identifies two key challenges for the future: retaining young audiences and improving BAME representation. It says that many mainstream services ‘skew white.’

Channel 4 saved from privatisation

Karen Bradley, the Culture Secretary has announced that Channel 4 will not be privatized. This brings to an end two years of uncertainty for the channel. Privatisation was strongly opposed by IBT as we felt that it would make some key international programmes such as Channel 4 News and Unreported World vulnerable to cuts. The Secretary of State has announced a new review to look at whether Channel 4 should relocate to Birmingham to ensure that it is less London centric as an organisation. Channel 4 is resisting the move, arguing that it would provide a serious distraction from its main task and that its actual physical location should not affect what is on the screen.

Fake News – what are the implications for NGOs?

Channel 4 has called for the introduction of a social media ‘kitemark’ so that regulated news organisations can make their online content stand out, as the main social media platforms find themselves under increasing political pressure to police fake news more effectively. The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee has also launched its own enquiry into fake news. The whole debate about fake news may ultimately be good for mainstream quality journalism if it can demonstrate its expertise and ethical values. IBT will be investigating the implications of this debate and the issue of trust in a new report to be published in the autumn. If you have any relevant experience of this issue please let us know.

Bond media group proposed messaging on aid

The Bond media group has identified three key messages that it is asking NGOs to include in their local press releases. The three messages all reflect key drivers that have the potential to persuade those who are marginally engaged to be more actively supportive of aid. The messages (and drivers) are: everyone deserves a fair chance in life (moral driver); making the world a safer place (personal efficacy); and Brits from the NHS through to the Army are playing an important role in tackling poverty (social norms). If you would like the exact wording or would like to find out more about the work of the Bond media group, contact Maryam mmohsin@bond.org.uk or Hratche Hratche.koundarjian@vsoint.org

Best wishes

Mark

March 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s March newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

This month’s briefing will be with Sky News

Sky News has been through significant change in recent times but it remains an influential broadcaster with a strong commitment to international content. Later this month, we will hear from Dan Williams, Sky’s Head of International News. Dan will talk us through the changes and the best way to pitch ideas for television and online. The briefing will take place at 10am on Wednesday March 29^th at the IBT offices in Southwark. You can register in the usual way via the IBT website.

Last month’s briefing with Unreported World

Our last briefing was with Monica Garnsey, the series editor of Channel 4’s international current affairs strand, Unreported World. She told us that she is keen to hear from IBT members who have potential ideas that might work for the strand – she is looking for stories that have not been covered by mainstream media, with strong characters and a narrative. Ideas can be pitched in a couple of paragraphs by phone or email – they do not need to be fully developed. Monica and her colleagues will start working on the next series in the summer so ideas should be pitched in June for filming in July-September. More detailed notes on the briefing can be found in the members’ area of the IBT website.

IBT at the Bond conference

For the first time, we will have a stand at the Bond conference. Do come and say hello and let us have your feedback on our work and particularly on the briefings and training events. All suggestions for future events will be very welcome. We are keen to recruit new members to IBT so if you have colleagues or friends from other organisations who are attending the conference do point them in our direction or send them a copy of our membership leaflet. https://ibt.org.uk/documents/miscellaneous/IBTmembershipleaflet-2017.pdf

Training in media skills

We are keen to hear about your training needs. We run regular training sessions aimed at media officers and CEOs. In the past these have covered virtual reality filmmaking, stills photography, shooting with an iPhone, online slideshows, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. We are currently planning some training events for the spring. It’s likely that the first one will be a refresher covering the latest trends on social media and giving some useful tips for how to make the best use of a range of platforms. Let me know if you’d be interested in attending or have other training needs that we can help address.

Talking about climate change

Climate Outreach has published a practical guide to accompany the #showthelove campaign. It looks at how best to communicate with the public, particularly right of centre audiences. The guide contains useful tips on the language that is most effective with these audiences. Some of the key messages include: stress continuity not change; beware of the post Brexit landscape where people are distrusting of elites and top-down messaging; promote the simplicity of sustainability; make climate messages tangible; and be humble with claims about renewables. http://climateoutreach.org/resources/centre-right-post-brexit/

DFID’s new direction

In case you missed it, DFID has published its first ever Economic Development Strategy, which gives a clear indication of its priorities under a new Secretary of State. The main focus of the report is on trade as an engine for poverty reduction. It also highlights the challenge of empowering poor and marginalized people so that they can benefit from economic growth.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/587374/DFID-Economic-Development-Strategy-2017.pdf

Media criticism of aid

DFID, under its Director of Comms, Tim Singleton, has introduced a new section on its website where it responds to media criticism, called ‘DFID in the News’ – its aim is to highlight ‘the facts behind media stories about DFID’s work.’

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dfid-in-the-news

Tim will be meeting with the Bond media group on Monday March 6^th to talk about a more joined up approach to media criticism by NGOs and DFID. In the meantime, Bond has asked its members to pledge additional funds to support a more strategic and collaborative response to the current media criticism of UK aid.

Decline in trust in NGOs

The results of the 2017 Edelman Trust barometer were published last month and they point to a decline in trust in NGOs across 28 countries, down from 66% in 2014 to 53% in 2017 (with actual distrust registered in the UK, Sweden and Japan). The figures for NGOs reflect a decline in trust for all our main institutions including business, government and media. At the bottom of the trust pile is government – and the most trustworthy of the four are NGOs. http://www.edelman.com/trust2017/

Charities promote the positive work that they do

A new report, Charity Today 2017, was published last month as part of a public facing campaign to draw attention to the positive contribution that NGOs make in the UK. The report is the result of a collaboration between ACEVO, the Charities Aid Foundation, the Institute of Fundraising and CharityComms. Its aim is to give people a better understanding of what charities do and how they operate.

https://www.acevo.org.uk/news/charity-today-2017

It’s also worth taking a look at the NCVO’s Constructive Voices project which links journalists with charities in the hope of securing more positive media coverage. https://www.ncvo.org.uk/about-us/media-centre#constructivevoices

The echo chamber effect of social media

Demos has published a new piece of research, Talking to Ourselves, which investigates the echo chamber effect of social media, whereby the breadth of information that we are shown online is being technologically narrowed, filtered by algorithms, and tailored by our increasing power to shape the news that we see. There’s some evidence to suggest that this is resulting in the strengthening of existing biases and political prejudices, and a narrowing of political, cultural and social awareness. This is a serious challenge for NGOs particularly those involved in campaigns that seek to reach mainstream audiences. The Demos paper shows that there is a strong connection between a user’s ideology and the users and news they interact with online. The paper makes no recommendations but it does underline the importance of mainstream news as a place where social media users with different political viewpoints are likely to encounter one another. https://www.demos.co.uk/project/talking-to-ourselves/

New research on public attitudes in sub Saharan Africa

A study by the Pew Research Center has investigated public attitudes in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. The report reveals that large segments of the public in all three countries feel that the political and economic system is stacked against them with a major concern being the lack of employment prospects.

http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/11/14/in-key-african-nations-widespread-discontent-with-economy-corruption/

If you’re interested in hearing more about the survey, the researchers will be presenting their findings at a Bond event tomorrow afternoon, Thursday March 2^nd. If you’d like to attend, contact Luke Stewart lstewart@bond.org.uk

Conference on refugees – call for papers from NGOs

CAMRI, the Communications and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster is calling for papers on the theme of counter narratives of the migrant and refugee experience. They are keen to hear from NGOs, academics and filmmakers who have documented the ‘hidden opportunities and unspoken challenges faced by migrants and refugees.’ The deadline is March 15^th. https://camri.ac.uk/2017/02/16/call-papers-rights-plight-cultural-counter-narratives-migrant-refugee-experiences/

Best wishes

Mark

Briefing Notes: Unreported World

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February 2017 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s February newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

New IBT annual report

Today we publish our annual report which covers our work in 2016. We held a number of briefings and training sessions for our members; we published two research reports (Small Screen, Big World which looked at the international content of news on TV and other outlets, and Climate Change on Television which examined media coverage of climate change a year after the all-important UN agreement in Paris) and we lobbied successfully for the strengthening of the global purpose in the new BBC Charter. If you have any questions about our work do get in touch.

https://ibt.org.uk/documents/IBT-internal-reports/ibtannual2016.pdf

This month’s briefing will be with Unreported World

Our next briefing will be with Monica Garnsey, the series producer of Channel 4’s international current affairs strand, Unreported World. This is the one space on mainstream television that guarantees coverage to under reported stories from around the world. Monica will talk about the sort of stories they are looking for and how best to pitch ideas to her and her team. She has worked extensively with NGOs in the past, including many IBT members. The last series of Unreported World was one of the best to date. Now entering its 18^th year, Unreported World remains an important part of the Channel 4 schedule but its position cannot be taken for granted. If the channel is privatized Unreported World is likely to be an early victim. The briefing with Monica will take place at 10am on Tuesday February 28^th. Spaces can be booked in the usual way via the IBT website.

Last month’s briefing with Today

Our last briefing was with Ollie Stone-Lee, the acting deputy editor of Radio 4’s Today programme. Ollie talked us through how the programme selects stories and how best to pitch ideas or suggest studio guests. They are keen to widen the range of voices that they feature. There is also a big digital push happening at Radio 4 with a dedicated online team promoting Today content across social media. Digital is driving change and giving the production team a clearer insight into the stories that audiences are interested in. International content does well online. Ollie also spoke about the move at BBC News for more so called ‘slow news’ which in practice means a greater emphasis on analysis and an attempt to track big picture changes that are taking place in society but are not reflected in the day to day news agenda. A more detailed note on what was said at the briefing can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

Defending aid

A meeting took place at Bond last month, bringing together media officers and others from across Bond’s membership, with the aim of developing a series of joint communications and campaign initiatives for 2017 which proactively make the case for maintaining aid spending. It’s clear that certain sections of the media, most notably The Daily Mail, have the Government’s 0.7% commitment to aid spending in their sights. As a result of the meeting, Bond has now set up a media group to coordinate the response from NGOs. The aim of the group is to ‘defend and put the case for UK aid into the media with increased frequency across all media types.’ The media group had its first virtual meeting earlier this week and a number of sub groups have been set up to look at messaging, research, engagement and strategy.  If you are interested in joining the group contact Hratche at VSO Hratche.Koundarjian@vsoint.org He is running the group in the absence of a Bond media officer.

New IBT research 

IBT is producing a new piece of research to be published in the spring. The main focus will be online video – we will be looking at a range of ways in which video is being viewed online and talking to the key platforms and content producers. The aim of the report is to develop a practical guide for IBT members who are producing online video content. If you’d like to contribute to the research, contact Sophie who is leading on this Sophie.chalk@btinternet.com

Changes at the BBC

In a speech last month Tony Hall, the BBC Director-General, outlined his strategy for the next Charter. A key priority is to reinvent the iPlayer for a new generation. This will inevitably mean more personalization. The thinking behind this, in the words of Tony Hall, is that ‘by finding out more about our audiences and what they like, we can make better content, make it more relevant, and bring it to them more effectively.’ This is of course, a good thing, but there is a danger that audiences will live in a bubble of content they love and be less exposed to content outside their range of interests.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/speeches/2017/tony-hall-ny-message

Regulation of the BBC for accuracy and impartiality

From April, the BBC will be regulated by Ofcom and the BBC Trust will be abolished. This is one of the major changes resulting from the new Charter. IBT is in the process of responding to a series of consultations by Ofcom. One issue of contention is regulation for accuracy and impartiality. At present, the BBC is regulated by the Trust for accuracy and impartiality across all BBC content, including online and the World Service. Under the current Ofcom proposals future regulation will only apply to BBC News on radio, TV and on the iPlayer. This is cause for concern and we have suggested to Ofcom that it finds other ways of monitoring the BBC to ensure that it delivers its commitment to accuracy and impartiality across the whole of its output. You can see our submission here:

https://ibt.org.uk/lobbying/ofcom-regulation-bbc-impartiality-accuracy-january-2017/

Fake News

A number of initiatives have been announced by social media platforms and broadcasters to address the issue of fake news. The BBC has launched a new service, Reality Check, which will investigate fake news online and expose it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/267ada11-b730-4344-b404-63067c032c65/reality-check

At the Today briefing, Ollie Stone-Lee told us that BBC news producers are trying to be more rigorous about fact checking and their use of data, so it’s important that NGOs check carefully any statistics that they supply to BBC News.

Channel 4 has announced a slate of new programmes to be broadcast this month which will also investigate the phenomenon of fake news.

http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/channel-4-announces-fake-news-week

Newspapers

A new report, Newspaper consumption in the mobile age, makes for interesting reading. Its author, Neil Thurman, from City University, examined 11 UK national newspapers and found that they are still largely read in the printed form – 89% of people read a newspaper as newsprint; 7.5% read it on their mobiles; 4% on their PCs. He also found that time spent reading the newspaper is much greater for those reading the paper itself than looking at the content online. The average time spent reading the paper as newsprint is 40 minutes a day; for those reading online the average time spent is 30 seconds. http://neilthurman.com/timespent.pdf

Human Rights Watch film festival

The Human Rights Watch film festival takes place in London next month, from March 6-17. Tickets go on sale next week. The festival opens with I’m Not Your Negro, a documentary charting the history of racism in the US. It closes with Nowhere to Hide, a documentary telling the story of a male nurse living and bringing up his children in the Iraqi city of Jalawla and filmed over several years. https://ff.hrw.org/london

Best wishes

Mark

January 2017 Newsletter

Happy New Year and welcome to IBT’s January newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

Briefing with Today

Our next briefing will be with John Shields, the Assistant Editor of Radio 4’s Today programme. John is responsible for planning and will talk us through how best to pitch ideas to him and his colleagues and the sort of ideas and studio guests they are looking for. Today is of course the most popular news programme in the UK, reaching a weekly audience of more than 7 million. This event will be held at the IBT offices at 10am on Tuesday January 24^th. You can register now via the IBT website. If you have already registered then there’s no need to do anything – you will receive full details of the event a few days in advance.

Tabloid attack on aid

The attack on foreign aid continues across many of the tabloids with the Daily Mail playing a leading role with its ‘charity begins at home’ campaign. The recent spate of attack pieces began with the New Year Honours list and the knighting of DFID Permanent Secretary, Mark Lowcock (Daily Mail and Express). It continued with an attack on cash transfers, focusing mainly on the DFID programme in Pakistan (Daily Mail, Sun and Express). The most recent attack was on DFID for funding super fast broadband in Monserrat whilst many in the UK don’t have this. There has been a strong fightback from NGOs with CEOs Mark Goldring (Oxfam) and Kevin Watkins (Save) writing think pieces, and on cash transfers many NGOs (including Mercy Corps, ActionAid, HelpAge International, Tearfund and International Rescue Committee) all highlighting areas where cash transfers work effectively and reliably. Bond is playing a leading role in coordinating the NGO response and will be holding a meeting for anyone working in campaigns, comms and media who wishes to collaborate on making the case for aid. The meeting will be held from 2-4pm on Thursday January 19th. To find out more contact Alice Delamare, Campaigns manager at Bond adelamare@bond.org.uk

Digital media and coverage of climate change

Last month, the Reuters Institute published new research highlighting the way in which new media has been covering climate change. The report, Something Old, Something New: Digital media and the coverage of climate change, focused on Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and Vice, and found that all three have made coverage of climate change a priority and have successfully changed the tone, style and format of coverage to attract audiences who are interested in the climate change story.

http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/something-old-something-new-digital-media-and-coverage-climate-change

New research website on humanitarian journalism

A group of academics has set up a website to further understanding of how the news media report on humanitarian crises and what shapes coverage. The Humanitarian Journalism project is working in partnership with a number of organisations, including IBT. The lead academics for the project are Martin Scott (UEA) who has authored several IBT reports, Mel Bunce (City) and Kate Wright (now at Edinburgh).

http://humanitarian-journalism.net/

One World Media Awards

Entries are now open for this year’s One World Media Awards which celebrate the best media coverage of developing countries and aim to reflect the social, political and cultural life of people around the world. The closing date for entries is Thursday February 2^nd. This annual event will be hosted by Jon Snow and held at BAFTA on Tuesday June 6^th. There are 15 different categories of award. The Refugee Reporting Award is sponsored by the British Red Cross and Transparency International sponsors the Corruption Reporting Award. The Special Award goes to an independent media organization based in a developing country that has made an outstanding contribution in holding to account those in power.

http://www.oneworldmedia.org.uk/2017-Awards-Enter

Briefings for CEOs

As part of our work we organise events specially targeted at CEOs to keep them well informed on the latest media trends and technology. Last month we held a training session on virtual reality filmmaking. Later this year we will be organizing our annual dinner and networking event – the guest speaker last year was Jamie Angus, the Editor of the Today programme. Do let us know if you have any suggestions for future sessions for CEOs.

Updating mailing list

Since we are keen that this newsletter goes to everyone who might be interested, please help us to keep up to date and let us know names of colleagues who should be on our mailing list. The newsletter and IBT events may be of interest to those involved in comms, media, digital and campaigns. The newsletter goes exclusively to staff working for IBT member organisations.

Best wishes

Mark

December 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s December newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.   (Download/Print this Newsletter)


Climate change on television 

Today we are launching our new report Climate Change on Television – what the Paris Agreement means for broadcasters. In the report we look at the track record of mainstream television in covering climate change and related issues, a year on from the historic UN agreement in Paris. Broadcasters are successfully incorporating climate change messaging in some popular programmes like Planet Earth 2 and commissioning some important new content such as Hugh’s War on Waste. There are signs that these are issues that are increasingly being prioritised by broadcasters. But the report calls on TV commissioners to experiment and take more risks, given the importance and urgency of building public awareness. Do share the report with friends and colleagues and let us have your comments on it. You can read it here https://ibt.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IBT-Climate-Change-on-Television.pdf

Climate change round table 

This morning we held a round table with broadcasters, independent producers and a range of experts, to discuss the findings of the report. It was a constructive meeting in which the broadcasters disclosed their future programming plans. It was rare to see all the main broadcasters – the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and Discovery – coming together to talk about one issue. Something which emerged from the discussion was that commissioners and producers said they would like to have a clearer understanding of what the priority areas should be for individual action by the UK public. We are planning to follow this up with some briefing events in which policy experts share this information with producers.

Briefing with Channel 4 News

Last month we held a briefing with Jon Laurence, Digital Editor on Channel 4 News. It was fascinating to hear from Jon about his strategy and the way he has built a substantial young online audience for Channel 4 News with video content on Facebook. This content includes cut down versions of features running on the evening news show but also packages using external content which may come from news agencies or NGOs. Infographics are popular too. Jon showed us some of the most watched videos, and talked us through key lessons about the sort of content that young people watch and share. Jon’s team produces around 60 videos a week and many receive 2 or 3m views. A briefing note on this event can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

Briefing with Today

Our next briefing will be in the new year with John Shields, the Assistant Editor of Radio 4’s Today programme. John is responsible for planning and will talk us through how best to pitch ideas to him and his colleagues and the sort of ideas and studio guests they are looking for. Today is of course the most popular news programme in the UK, reaching a weekly audience of more than 7 million. It will be interesting to see how it changes under its new editor, now that Jamie Angus has announced that he is stepping down. This event will be held at the IBT offices at 10am on Tuesday January 24^th. You can register now via the IBT website.

Changes at BBC News

James Harding, the BBC’s Director of News has announced that BBC News will shift its focus to provide more analysis and explanation. Harding told BBC staff last month that the BBC is ‘extremely good at reporting the what but we need to be better at the why.’ To aid the strategy, the present BBC News will be divided into two divisions: BBC News for daily news content and BBC Stories for analytical content and the stories of human experience. These changes are very welcome. IBT has been urging the BBC to shift its focus away from the big story of the day and to increase the range of its news content. We also understand that BBC News is looking for ways of telling more positive news stories that have the potential to be empowering, as they feel these are the sort of stories that appeal to younger audiences.

Expansion of the BBC World Service

Fran Unsworth, Director of the World Service has announced that the BBC will launch 11 new language services following an injection of extra money from the Government. This means that the World Service will now broadcast in 40 languages. The expansion will also include extended news bulletins in Russian, enhanced TV services across Africa, more resources for BBC Arabic and for broadcasts aimed at audiences in North Korea. Many of the new resources reflect the Government’s political and foreign policy priorities. The World Service, like the rest of BBC News, will also shift resources to provide more analysis and explanation.

Jagdish Gundara

It is with great sadness that I announce the death of Jagdish Gundara, after a long illness. Jagdish was one of the founders of IBT and served for many years as a Trustee. He stepped down from his role at IBT in 2012. Jagdish held the UNESCO Chair in International Studies and Teacher Education and was Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education. We will all remember him as someone who was immensely kind and supportive. He will be greatly missed.

Best wishes

Mark

IBT’s mission is to use the media to further awareness and understanding of people’s lives in the developing world and the issues which affect them

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Briefing Notes: Channel 4 News

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November 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s November newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

Next briefing will be with Channel 4 News

Later this month we will hear from Jon Laurence, Digital Editor on Channel 4 News. Jon has been remarkably successful in building the show’s online presence with videos receiving 200m Facebook views per month – more than the main BBC News Facebook page and more than ITV and Sky News. Jon will talk us through his online strategy and also advise us on how best to pitch story ideas to the programme. The briefing will be at 10am on Tuesday November 22^nd. You can book your place now via the IBT website.

An introduction to virtual reality

Last month we ran our first workshop on virtual reality and 360 video, with two VR experts, Mark Atkin and Tom Millen, taking us through all the key aspects of VR and how it can best be used by NGOs. We also heard from Catherine Feltham about the lessons she had learnt whilst making WaterAid’s 360 film, Aftershock. This was an inspiring event and it’s clear that there is huge potential for charities to use VR and 360 for fundraising and public engagement. If there’s sufficient demand, we plan to run another VR training event early next year.

Virtual reality workshop for CEOs

Given the success of our virtual reality training session and the potential of this new technology, we will be running a much smaller event in mid December aimed at CEOs. This will give CEOs a condensed account of what they need to know about VR and an understanding of its strengths and limitations. We also want to encourage CEOs to think strategically about how this technology can be used for public engagement as well as for fundraising. We’ll be organising a breakfast meeting in mid December. If your CEO is interested in attending please let me know as we are just about to finalise the date.

The BBC’s global coverage

Last month we met Charlotte Moore, the BBC’s Director of Content, to talk about her future strategy for global coverage now that the new Charter has been finalized. Charlotte has overall responsibility for all content on TV, radio and online and she is also Controller of BBC1. It’s clear from our meeting that she has a strong commitment to strengthening the BBC’s non news global coverage and to finding new ways of reaching mainstream audiences with such content. She cited The Chronicles of Nadiya as one example. In this BBC1 show, the former Great British Bake Off winner travelled to Bangladesh to present a personal view of the country. The Refugee Camp and Exodus, both on BBC2, were other examples she gave of attempts by the BBC to commission distinctive international content. Charlotte said she would welcome future dialogue with IBT.

Ethnic minority audiences

The TV analysts, Attentional, have been looking at the viewing habits of ethnic minorities and come up with some interesting conclusions. It appears that there is a general trend of ethnic minority viewers moving away from the main public service broadcasters. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/12/ethnic-minority-audiences-not-keen-mainstream-tv-dramas  At the same time, diversity on and off the screen continues to be a major challenge for broadcasters. Sky has set quotas whereas others have chosen instead to opt for targets. The Sky strategy has paid off and the broadcaster is close to achieving 20% on screen ethnic minority representation across its output.

The Aid Attitudes Tracker

This Gates funded project continues to track public attitudes to aid in the UK, France, Germany and the US. In the UK, it is using a sample of over 8,000 people. The latest UK poll considers whether attitudes have changes since the Brexit referendum. It finds that there has been no significant change in public attitudes to aid since the referendum. However it appears that the trend of declining engagement with global poverty, which has been tracked for the past three years, is continuing. The percentage of people donating to global poverty organisations has dropped from 36 to 22% in the last 12 months; the number of people who have read, watched or listened to a news article about global poverty has declined from 66 to 54% in the same period. Trust in charities is low with 27% of those polled saying they had very little or no trust in charitable organisations. We are working with the team at Gates to design a new piece of research that will look more closely at media consumption habits and how different types of media content influence attitudes to poverty and other global issues.

Making the case for aid

Save the Children has commissioned Making the case for aid, a new piece of research from the research agency Britain Thinks. The aim of the research is to look at centre-right attitudes to aid and to explore the sort of messaging that works best for this audience. The research was commissioned by the Government relations team at Save to help them in their work with Government Ministers and backbench Conservative MPs. It has not been made publicly available but they are happy for us to share the findings with IBT members. Many of its conclusions will be familiar. This group wants to see evidence of impact and feels proud that the UK is playing a leading role in helping those who are worse off. However, the group is less keen on messaging that emphasises national interest or combatting corruption.

Children and how they experience global events

The NSPCC has reported that there are signs of growing anxiety amongst children about global events. It appears that children’s exposure to global issues through television and social media is leading to an increase in anxiety about world affairs. The BBC and others are trying to redress the balance with more positive coverage of global issues for children. CBeebies has commissioned a new documentary series, Where in the World, which explores the lives of children living around the world. We hope to collaborate with the Where in the World team to host an event next year which looks at how children in the UK experience world events through the media. If you are interested in contributing to this event please let me know.

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/the-guardian/20161031/281668254528403

Digital guide for Trustees

Zoe Amar has written a very useful guide in conjunction with the Charity Commission. Making digital work: 12 questions for Trustees to consider sets out some of the key issues that Trustees should think about when considering the implications of, and the fast changing nature of, digital technology.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/making-digital-work-12-questions-for-trustees-to-consider?platform=hootsuite

Global Health Film Festival

The second annual Global Health Film Festival takes place at the Barbican on November 11^th and 12^th. Film screenings include A Plastic Ocean (which looks at the consequences of our disposable lifestyle) and The True Cost (on the global clothing industry). Tickets for the festival are on sale now. http://www.globalhealthfilm.org/ghff-2016

European Social Documentary training open for applications

ESoDoc, the EU funded European Social Documentary training initiative is open for applications. This innovative training scheme brings together young professionals from across Europe, working in the documentary, new media and NGO sectors, to collaborate on developing new social action projects. http://www.esodoc.eu/

Best wishes

Mark

IBT’s mission is to use the media to further awareness and understanding of people’s lives in the developing world and the issues which affect them

If you do not wish to receive this newsletter please reply with unsubscribe in the subject line

October 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s October newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

New BBC Charter

The Government has now published the new BBC Charter. I’m delighted to report that we have been successful in securing the wording of the global purpose that we lobbied for. This means that ‘factual programmes’ will be included as well as news and current affairs. The new wording also commits the BBC to making international content that appeals to ‘all audiences’. We will be following this up later this month when we meet Charlotte Moore, the BBC Director of Content. I’d like to than all the CEOs of IBT member organisations who signed a joint letter in support of the new wording, which was sent to the Secretary of State at DCMS, the BBC Director General and the Chair of the BBC Trust.

 An introduction to virtual reality

Later this month, we will be holding our first training event on virtual reality (VR). It’s becoming an important tool for NGOs and many have successfully used it in their campaigning, communications and fundraising work. In this half day event, organised specially for IBT members, two VR experts, Mark Atkin and Tim Millen, will take us through all the key aspects of VR and how it can best be used by NGOs. They will look at the benefits for NGOs of using this new technology, how to make a VR documentary and the strengths and weaknesses of VR. We’ll also hear from Catherine Feltham who will talk about her own experience of making a VR film for WaterAid about a village in Nepal http://www.wateraid.org/uk/get-involved/virtual-reality The event will run from 9-2 on Friday October 21^st. Lunch will be provided. There are a few places left – If you’d like to come, register now via the IBT website.

Last month’s briefing – with ITV’s On Assignment

Last month we heard from the editors of ITV’s international current affairs strand, On Assignment. Natalie Fay, Executive Producer and Delilah Jeary, Series Producer told us how they decide which stories to commission and the kind of mix that works best for them. They encouraged IBT members to get in touch with story ideas for the monthly strand, which is made in house by ITN, with films presented by their main correspondents. A more detailed note about the briefing can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

Annual IBT dinner

Last month we also held our annual dinner for CEOs of IBT member organisations. The guest speaker was Jamie Angus, the Editor of the Today programme. Jamie spoke about his ambition to broaden the international agenda of Today and encouraged the CEOs present to get in touch if there were important stories that were being missed. We can’t publish details of Jamie’s speech as the event was held under Chatham House rules. However, we’ll be following it up with a briefing early next year with the Planning Editor of Today.

 Charity social media toolkit

Zoe Amar and David Evans have launched an online guide to social media – it’s aimed at small and large charities and has a wealth of useful and practical information on the best ways for charities to use social media.

http://landing.skillsplatform.org/charitysocialmediatoolkit/

Coming up

Film Africa – returns for another year this time showing 52 films from 22 African countries, October 28^th – November 6^th http://www.filmafrica.org.uk/

Speak Up on Climate Change – a week of action organized by the Climate Coalition, October 6^th-16^th http://www.theclimatecoalition.org/

Before the Flood – Leonardo Di Caprio’s documentary on climate change will be screened at the London Film Festival on October 15^th https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=beforetheflood&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=

Unreported World – the new series is back in its usual slot, Fridays at 7.30pm on Channel 4. This week’s episode is India’s Blind Dates. If you missed last week’s, Yemen – Britain’s Unseen War, it’s well worth watching http://www.channel4.com/programmes/unreported-world/

Best wishes

Mark

IBT’s mission is to use the media to further awareness and understanding of people’s lives in the developing world and the issues which affect them

 If you do not wish to receive this newsletter please reply with unsubscribe in the subject line

Briefing Notes: On Assignment

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September 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s September newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

Next briefing – with ITV’s On Assignment

Our next briefing will be with the editors of ITV’s international current affairs strand, On Assignment. It will take place at 10am on Tuesday September 20^th. If you’d like to attend please register via the IBT website. The speakers will be Natalie Fay, Executive Producer and Delilah Jeary, Series Producer. They will show clips from the programme and talk about the ideas they are looking for and how best to pitch to them. The monthly strand is made by ITN and features three specially commissioned short films – it’s a great opportunity for IBT members to get off agenda stories onto prime time television.

http://www.itv.com/news/topic/on-assignment/

Next training event – an introduction to virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) is an increasingly important tool for NGOs and many have successfully used it in their campaigning, communications and fundraising work. In this half day event for IBT members, two VR experts, Mark Atkin and Tim Millen, will take us through all the key aspects of VR and how it can best be used by NGOs. They will look at the benefits for NGOs of using this new technology, how to make a VR documentary and the strengths and weaknesses of VR. We’ll also hear from Catherine Feltham who will talk about her own experience of making a VR film for WaterAid about a village in Nepal http://www.wateraid.org/uk/get-involved/virtual-reality The event will run from 9-2 on Friday October 21^st. Lunch will be provided. If you’d like to come, register via the IBT website.

Climate change think piece

We will be publishing a new research report in December, a year after the COP21 global climate change talks in Paris. The aim of the report will be to look at media –particularly television – coverage of climate change and whether it has changed significantly since Paris, given the global consensus that climate change requires urgent action to mitigate its impacts. The report will be written by Professor Joe Smith from the Open University, who has collaborated with us before on our climate change work. It will be presented to a round table of media industry leaders. The speaker at this event will be Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief. We are keen to hear from IBT members who have been working on the issue of climate change. If you have had any dealings with the media on this topic and are happy to share your experience please let me know.

BBC Charter and Channel 4 update

The draft BBC Charter is due to be published later this month. We will be looking out in particular for the wording of the new global purpose – something we have been actively lobbying on in recent months. We will also be arguing that international content on the BBC should be measured and used as a marker of distinctiveness. Although there is a new Secretary of State at DCMS, it’s not yet clear what impact this has had on the Charter renewal process. In the meantime, Channel 4 has asked for clarity over its future. It had been thought that privatization of the channel had been ruled out but the new team at DCMS has said that it remains an option. IBT has strongly opposed privatization as we believe that it is likely to result in a diminution of the channel’s public service content – and international programmes such as Unreported World are especially vulnerable.

Book launch – media coverage of Africa

Africa’s Media Image in the 21^st Century – this new book looks at media coverage of Africa and tries to go beyond the usual stereotypes of ‘darkest Africa’ or ‘Africa rising’. The launch takes place at 7pm on Tuesday September 13^th at SOAS. http://www.royalafricansociety.org/event/africas-media-image-21st-century

NGO communications

Charity Comms has launched its Inspiring Communicator Awards for 2016. The aim of the awards is to recognize and celebrate inspirational communicators in the charity sector. It’s free to enter and anyone can be nominated. http://www.charitycomms.org.uk/awards?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=ICA%20launch%20email&utm_content=05092016&utm_campaign=ICA%202016

Coming up – on radio, television and in the cinema

Costing the Earth – in this week’s episode, Big Oil Big Trouble, Tom Heap examines how the oil companies have responded to the threat of climate change. First broadcast is on Radio 4 at 3.30pm Tuesday September 6^th. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07syt8k

When Two Worlds Collide – a superb documentary charting the violent conflict in Peru, between the Government and the indigenous people, over natural resources in the Amazon rainforest. Opens at Picturehouse Central in London on Friday September 9^th

https://www.picturehouses.com/cinema/Picturehouse_Central/film/when-two-worlds-collide

The True Cost – this feature length documentary investigating the impact of the global clothing industry on people and the planet, will be screened at the RSA on Monday September 19^thhttps://www.rsm.ac.uk/events/events-listing/2015-2016/groups/global-health/fig07-global-health-film-initiative-the-true-cost-screening.aspx

The Chronicles of Nadiya – this BBC1 documentary series is still available to watch on iPlayer. It featured Nadiya Hussain, winner of last year’s Great British Bake Off, travelling to Bangladesh and exploring the country and its food. It’s refreshing to see BBC1 making such populist and accessible content about a country like Bangladesh.

Best wishes

Mark

IBT’s mission is to use the media to further awareness and understanding of people’s lives in the developing world and the issues which affect them

August 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s August newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.   (Download/Print this Newsletter)

Briefing with ITV’s On Assignment

Our next briefing will be with the editors of ITV’s international current affairs strand, On Assignment. The strand appears once a month and features three specially commissioned short films – it’s a great opportunity for IBT members to get off agenda stories onto prime time television. The speakers will be Natalie Fay, Executive Producer and Delilah Jeary, Series Producer. Natalie and Delilah will show clips from the programme and talk about the ideas they are looking for and how best to pitch to them. On Assignment recently won the Women’s Rights in Africa award at the One Media Awards for its reporting from South Africa. You can find out more about the strand here http://www.itv.com/news/topic/on-assignment/  The briefing will take place at 10am on Tuesday September 20^th. If you’d like to attend please register via the IBT website.

New Trustees

At last month’s AGM, we elected six new Trustees who join the IBT Board with immediate effect. We’re delighted to welcome Lily Caprani (from UNICEF), Paulette Cohen (Barclays), Michelle Davis (Malaria Consortium), James Georgalakis (IDS), Richard Grange (ActionAid) and Jack Lundie (Oxfam). If you have any issues concerning IBT or its governance, do feel free to get in touch with a member of staff or a Trustee.

Record ratings for Today programme

Radio 4’s Today programme has had its highest ever audiences. The latest Rajar figures cover the period April – June and coincide with the Brexit campaign and referendum vote. Today’s weekly reach in this period rose to 7.4m compared with 6.8m in the previous quarter. Jamie Angus, the Editor of Today, will be the guest speaker at our annual dinner for CEOs in September.

Channel 4 News cracks Facebook

Channel 4 News has enjoyed a remarkable success on Facebook. In the last year it has virtually stopped posting text and stills on social media and concentrated almost exclusively on video. This has paid off and Channel 4 News now has 200m Facebook video views per month – more than the main BBC News Facebook page and more than Sky and ITV News. We hope to organize a briefing with Channel 4 News’ digital editor later this year. http://digiday.com/publishers/channel-4-news-grew-monthly-facebook-video-views-200-million/

On TV

There have been some standout TV programmes in recent weeks. Hugh Fearnley-Whittigstall brought his campaigning zeal to a new episode of War on Waste on BBC1. His focus was non-recyclable coffee cups and packaging. It was good to see the BBC dealing with sustainability in such an accessible way on prime time TV. The BBC also brought us The Refugee Camp, shown on BBC2. This looked in detail at life in Zaatari and provided a useful insight into how aid actually works on the ground. Both programmes are still available to view on the BBC iPlayer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07m8qwz

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07lpgqz/episodes/player

Twitter event for NGOs

Twitter is organizing a training session for NGOs to offer top tips on how to use the social media site to extend the reach of your message. The event will take place at 5pm on Tuesday August 30^th at Twitter’s London HQ. It will cover best practice, how to plan an online campaign, engaging with conversations on Twitter, how to use its safety, analytics and multimedia tools. Places are free but limited to three per organisation. You can register here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe4tHuHE-9qk5PZcnwUFlxbdZMZCvleFpe1Ar6EJF7Ekl8rKA/viewform

Best wishes

Mark

IBT’s mission is to use the media to further awareness and understanding of people’s lives in the developing world and the issues which affect them

July 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s July newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.   (Download/Print this Newsletter)

IBT AGM

Our AGM takes place later this month – at 5pm on Tuesday July 12^th at the IBT offices in Southwark. It is open to all and is the one occasion in our calendar when IBT members can hear about what we have achieved in the past year and our future plans. It’s also the occasion when we elect our Trustees. This year we have a number of old Trustees stepping down and new ones taking over. Please get in touch if you’d like to attend or see the meeting papers.

Strengthening the BBC’s global purpose

Many thanks to the thirteen CEOs from IBT member organisations who signed letters last month to the Secretary of State at DCMS, the BBC Director General and the Chair of the BBC Trust. These letters have helped to support our case. We have been told that the Government is now actively considering ways of strengthening the global purpose in the new Charter. They are looking into changing the wording of purpose 1 which covers news and current affairs but could now be extended to include factual programmes. They are also investigating whether international content could be one of the criteria used to measure distinctiveness – if this happens, it will be a major step forward and will almost certainly result in the BBC commissioning more international content. We will know more when the new Charter is published in September. In the meantime if you would like more information on this please contact Sophie Chalk, our Head of Advocacy:  sophie.chalk@btinternet.com

 Last month’s briefing with Al Jazeera English

Last month we heard from Al Jazeera English’s Head of News, Ben Rayner. Ben talked about Al Jazeera’s continuing commitment to set a different news agenda from western broadcasters and its affinity with NGOs and the stories that they seek to tell. He gave us useful, practical information on how to pitch ideas to the different planning editors and how to suggest studio guests. Al Jazeera English now broadcasts from only two locations, Doha and London. London is currently on air daily from 5 -11.30pm. A more detailed note on the briefing is available on the IBT website.

Climate change on television

Last month we held a panel discussion at the Sheffield Documentary Festival entitled How to pitch your climate change idea. The session featured independent producers and broadcasters talking about the challenges of pitching climate change related ideas. It also identified opportunities in the schedule for mainstream content that tackles climate change. We also organized a film competition at Sheffield for the best climate change project. The quality of entries was high. Congratulations to filmmaker Jared Scott on winning the pitch for his Windfall project.

Can documentaries help us tell a different story about global development?

Last month we co-hosted a debate with the Institute of Development Studies, looking at the potential for documentaries to engage mainstream audiences with development. The speakers included the multi award winning filmmaker Jezza Neumann who spoke eloquently about both the opportunities and challenges of such films. There was an animated audience discussion which highlighted the need for NGOs and academics to ask more questions when they collaborate with filmmakers. It also made clear the importance of greater differentiation and a better understanding of how different types of documentary are able to reach different audiences. See my blog for IDS:

http://www.ids.ac.uk/opinion/can-documentaries-help-us-to-tell-a-different-story-about-development

One World Media Awards

Last month’s One World Media Awards was hosted for the first time by Alex Crawford from Sky News and showcased the best of international journalism. The television documentary prize went to The Truth About Ebola, a This World film for BBC2 made by Quicksilver, producers of Channel 4’s Unreported World strand. The journalist of the year was Erika Solomon from the Financial Times, with Patrick Kingsley of The Guardian and Gabriel Gatehouse of Newsnight, the runners up. It was good to see ITV’s On Assignment strand winning the Women’s Rights in Africa award. We will be hosting a briefing with the editors of On Assignment in the Autumn. A full list of winners is here: http://www.oneworldmedia.org.uk/2016-winners

Public trust in charities falls

New research from the Charity Commission has found that people are increasingly concerned about how charities spend their money and perceived aggressive fundraising techniques. The main reason given for trusting charities less was media coverage. Overall trust has declined from from 67% in 2014 to 57% in 2016. The research is based on a representative sample of 1,000 people and a number of focus groups. 74% of people surveyed said they were uncomfortable with some fundraising methods, up from 66% in 2014.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/532104/Public_trust_and_confidence_in_charities_2016.pdf

Best wishes

Mark

Briefing Notes: Al Jazeera

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June 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s June newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.   (Download/Print this Newsletter)

BBC global purpose letter from CEOs

The Government has published its plans for the future of the BBC, which include a change to the overall purposes of the BBC. The global purpose has been split into two – one aspect focuses on the World Service and the other covers international content for UK audiences. We are concerned that this second aspect has been diluted as it now includes only news and current affairs. We have been organizing a joint letter from IBT members to the DCMS, BBC Executive and BBC Trust, urging them to agree to new wording which includes all factual programmes. I’d like to thank the CEOs who have agreed to sign this letter. We are up to nine CEOs now. If you haven’t signed and would like to, please get in touch today. Our deadline for signatures is Monday at noon. We are optimistic that we will achieve the change that we are lobbying for but this letter from CEOs will strengthen our case considerably. Contact Sophie Chalk, IBT’s Head of Advocacy if you’d like to sign the letter: sophie.chalk@btinternet.com

This month’s briefing will be with Al Jazeera

Later this month we will be hearing from Al Jazeera’s Head of News, Ben Rayner. This will be our last briefing before the summer, so do come along if you can. Ben will talk about how to pitch ideas to Al Jazeera and the sort of stories and studio guests they are looking for. In our recent report Small Screen, Big World, Al Jazeera was the broadcaster with the highest percentage of international stories (more than the BBC World Service) and its coverage had a strong Middle East focus. Ben will be talking to us at 2pm on Tuesday June 21^st. Please note the 2pm start as opposed to our usual morning slot. If you’d like to come, book your place via the IBT website.

Last month’s briefing with ITV News

Last month we heard from Alok Jha, Science correspondent for ITV News. He gave us a lot of useful tips on how to pitch stories to him and his colleagues and drew our attention to On Assignment, ITV’s monthly international current affairs show. He is a regular contributor and there is demand from the show for strong international stories. A briefing note on Alok’s talk can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

The Syrian refugee crisis – are we getting it right?

Last month we co-hosted a parliamentary briefing on the Syrian refugee crisis with Channel 4 and Amnesty. We played clips from the recent Channel 4 film Children on the Frontline: the Escape and two of the family featured in the film spoke movingly at the event. Other speakers included Rae McGrath from Mercy Corps, Yvette Cooper for Labour and Andrew Mitchell for the Conservatives. Our thanks to all who attended the event and contributed to a very lively discussion.

Can documentaries help us tell a different story about global development?

Later this month we will be co-hosting an event with the Institute of Development Studies, exploring the role that documentaries play in telling stories about development. The speakers include Jezza Neumann, from True Vision. Jezza is a multi-award winning director whose credits include Children of Gaza and Zimbabwe’s Forgotten Children. Other speakers will be James Georgalakis and Keetie Roelen from IDS. The event will take place at 1pm on Wednesday June 22^nd at the University of Sussex campus near Brighton. Please share details of the event with friends and colleagues who live or work in the area. http://www.ids.ac.uk/events/can-documentaries-help-us-tell-a-different-story-about-global-development

Climate change at Sheffield DocFest     

If you’re going to the Sheffield Documentary Festival, look out for our two sessions. How to pitch your climate change idea takes place on Tuesday June 14^th at 10am. We’ll be hearing from the heads of development from three leading independent production companies about their experience of researching, developing and pitching a range of ideas linked to climate change. Tom McDonald, the BBC’s lead commissioner for natural history and factual formats will respond. Later that day we will be holding our climate change pitch in which five filmmakers pitch their ideas to a panel of  commissioners from Channel 4, Discovery and the BBC. Both sessions will be chaired by Tom Heap, the Countryfile and Panorama presenter. https://sheffdocfest.com/events/4845https://sheffdocfest.com/sessions/4855?day=4

The Community Channel – for just £50 you can become a co-owner

The Community Channel has launched a radical initiative to secure its future. It plans to sell shares to the general public so that it will become the first people-owned TV channel for social impact anywhere in the world. The money raised will help cover costs while the channel builds its team, develops new digital platforms and grows its audiences, income and impact across TV, digital and social platforms. It will enable the channel to boost existing income and launch new income streams to sustain itself in the long-term. http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/community-channel?utm_source=Media%20Trust&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7171710_Community%20Shares%20Launch&dm_i=46N,49PQ6,BNIKCF,FLRCL,1

Best wishes

Mark

May 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s May newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.   (Download/Print this Newsletter)
 

Small Screen, Big World

Today we publish our new research report Small Screen, Big World which looks at the content of TV news in January 2016. This detailed analysis covers all the main UK TV and radio bulletins and online news websites during a two week period. We found that there has been an increase in the amount of international news coverage but much of this was devoted to Syria and the refugee crisis. The range of countries and stories covered, compared with the last time we conducted this research, has narrowed. We also looked at who was being interviewed by reporters and found that there is a strong emphasis on first person testimony and far fewer opportunities for NGO representatives to be interviewed. To put this analysis in context we interviewed news editors, NGOs and academics. See https://ibt.org.uk/reports/smallscreen_bigworld/

Next briefing is with ITV News

We have a few places left for our briefing with Alok Jha, the Science correspondent of ITV News. Alok will talk about his own brief which includes science, weather, climate, water, medicine and technology. He’ll also talk about the best way to pitch ideas to ITV News, the sort of ideas that work best for them and the changes that have taken place including to the flagship News at Ten bulletin. This event will be at 10am on Wednesday May 25^th and places can be booked via the IBT website.

Last month’s briefing with The World Tonight

Last month we heard from Roger Sawyer, the recently appointed editor of The World Tonight, Radio 4’s international news and current affairs show. Roger talked about how the tone and content of The World Tonight is changing and his emphasis on finding new angles to a running story, breaking new stories and featuring new voices. The merger with the World Service programme, Newshour, means that there are now more funds to send reporters abroad. Roger manages four hours a day of World Service content. Here the emphasis is on the main stories of the day. He is keen to identify potential studio guests with a strong emphasis on women and ethnic minorities – both groups are currently under represented. A detailed note of what was said at the briefing can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

Advanced Twitter training

We have a few places left at our advanced Twitter training session. This is aimed at those engaging regularly with Twitter and wanting to think more about defining and measuring success, as well as learning about new ways to use the platform. The session will cover: content, frequency, paid advertising capabilities, and using video content through interrogations with services like Periscope and Vine. With practical exercises and a chance to learn from the experiences of others in the sector, participants will leave with fresh ideas for how to make the most of Twitter and ensure it ties into overall organisational marketing strategy. The event is free to IBT members and takes place on Tuesday May 17^th from 9.30am to 1pm at the IBT offices in Southwark. Places can be booked via the IBT website.

Call for more constructive news

Last month’s call by the UN for a more constructive approach to news received widespread media coverage including an interview on the Today programme with Michael Møller, Director General of the UN Office at Geneva. He gave an eloquent explanation of what he means by ‘constructive’ news and made it clear that he was not talking about more ‘good’ news and less ‘bad’ news. His argument was that there should be space for more nuanced coverage and a bigger emphasis on solutions-focused reporting. Interestingly, this was something that Roger Sawyer of The World Tonight spoke about in our briefing with him. Michael Moller felt there was a need to rethink international news coverage to combat potential apathy and indifference. NCVO, the charity umbrella group, has also announced the launch of its own Constructive Voices project. The aim of the NCVO project is to help charities to tell their story by linking them with journalists. See https://www.ncvo.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/2-content/1250-constructive-voices-helping-charities-tell-their-story

Call for charities to adapt better to the digital age

There is a tension in the way many charities view digital technology according to new research by Eduserv in partnership with CharityComms. Although many in the charity sector are enthusiastic about social media in particular, the report’s authors argue that digital technology requires a fundamental shift in the way charities work – and this is not taking place. The charity sector has a lower level of digital skills amongst its workforce than other sectors. The lack of skills is also a governance issue with the report’s authors calling for Trustees to develop a better understanding of how audiences use social media. http://www.charitycomms.org.uk/articles/a-manifesto-for-digital-change-in-2016

BBC’s global audience grows

The global audience for BBC news continues to grow. The latest figures show that the BBC reaches 348 million people around the world – which puts it ahead of schedule to reach its target of 500 million by 2022. For the first time, TV news, with a global audience of 162m is ahead of radio with an audience at 147m. The top five markets for the BBC’s international news services are: USA, Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Iran.

Best wishes

Mark

April 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s April newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

This month’s briefing with The World Tonight

We have a few places left for our next briefing, which will be with Roger Sawyer, the recently appointed editor of The World Tonight, Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs show. Roger also edits the World Service programme, Newshour. He has a strong interest in international issues and stories and The World Tonight has always had significantly more international coverage than other radio and tv news bulletins. Roger will explain to us how content is commissioned by the two programmes, how studio guests are recruited – and where this fits in with the rest of the BBC News operation. This event is free and open to all IBT members. It will take place from 10 -11.30 on Wednesday April 27^th at the IBT offices in Southwark. If you’d like to attend, please register now, using the members’ area of the IBT website. Any problems registering, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help.

Last month’s briefing with Marie Claire and GQ

Last month we heard from Andrea Thompson, Features Editor at Marie Claire and Stuart McGurk, Senior Commissioning Editor at British GQ. These are two magazines that have remained strongly committed to running in depth global stories. Both Andrea and Stuart said they did not receive many pitches from NGOs and they are keen to receive more. But the pitches should not be generic – original journalism with a new angle on a familiar story would work well for GQ; a case study with a strong female angle about an important global issue or story would work well for Marie Claire. Pitches should go direct to Andrea and Stuart by email – bear in mind that both magazines have long lead times. Notes from this event are available on the members’ page of the IBT website.

Training sessions next month

We have three training events next month. Places are limited as these sessions work best with small groups. All three will be run by Mary Mitchell, our regular social media trainer. If you’d like to attend, please register via the members’ page of the IBT website. If you’re not sure whether these sessions are right for you, please get in touch and I will provide more details.

1. An Introduction to Instagram and Snapchat

This hands-on training session will introduce participants to the capabilities of Instagram and Snapchat, ideas of when to use these platforms for campaigns and an overview of the audiences on each platform.  With exercises including image editing and writing captions, this session is designed for users who are familiar with social media but have limited experience of Instagram or Snapchat. It will take place on Tuesday May 3^rd from 9.30am to 1pm at the IBT offices in Southwark.

2. Twitter for beginners

This hands-on session is aimed at newcomers to Twitter. It will cover the basics of the platform and its functionality, tips on finding and scheduling content, measuring success, using Twitter to fundraise, and how to spark conversation. The session will showcase case studies from the international development sector and provide ideas for how to get started building a charity brand and engaging your audience in conversation.  It will take place on Tuesday May 10^th from 9.30am to 1pm at the IBT offices in Southwark.

3. Going further with Twitter

This interactive training session is pitched at those engaging regularly with Twitter and wanting to think more about defining and measuring success, as well as learning about new ways to use the platform. The session will cover topics including content, frequency, paid advertising capabilities, and using video content through interrogations with services like Periscope and Vine. With practical exercises and a chance to learn from the experiences of others in the sector, participants will leave with fresh ideas for how to make the most of Twitter and ensure it ties into overall organisational marketing strategy. This session takes place on Tuesday May 17^th from 9.30am to 1pm at the IBT offices in Southwark.

Other news in brief

• Climate Outreach has published new research which investigates how images about climate change engage a range of audiences:
  http://climateoutreach.org/introducing-climate-visuals-an-innovative-new-resource-for-visual-climate-change-communication/
• The BBC is to launch a major advertising campaign to encourage people in the UK to listen to the World Service after audience research found that UK audiences perceive the World Service as being principally for overseas listeners.
• The Times and Sunday Times have merged their websites and dropped rolling news in favour of an edition-based approach. There will be one daily edition online which will be updated at 9am, 12 noon and 5pm to coincide with peak traffic. http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/newly-merged-times-and-sunday-times-websites-drop-rolling-news-favour-edition-based-approach
• The House of Lords Communications Select Committee is to launch a new inquiry into the future of Channel 4 in the light of suggestions that the Government plans to privatize what is currently a public corporation. IBT will be submitting evidence to the inquiry:http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/communications-committee/news-parliament-2015/sustainability-of-channel-4-inquiry-launch/

• One World Media has announced the long list for all 15 categories of the awards which will take place on Thursday June 16^th. Tickets for the awards will go on sale later this month.http://www.oneworldmedia.org.uk/longlist-2016

Framing the future of water – tonight

I’ll be chairing an event at the Frontline Club tonight which examines how the media can be more effective in engaging target audiences with the complex issue of water. Tickets are still available. If you’re unable to attend, you can follow on Twitter using the hashtag #futureofwater.

Best wishes

Mark

Briefing Notes: Marie Claire and GQ

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March 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s March newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

This month’s briefing with Marie Claire and GQ

Later this month we’ll hear from Andrea Thompson, Features Editor at Marie Claire and Stuart McGurk, Senior Commissioning Editor at British GQ. These are two magazines that have remained strongly committed to running in depth global stories. Andrea and Stuart will talk us through the commissioning process, the kind of stories they are looking for, their experience of working with NGOs. They’re keen too to hear what we think they should be reporting on. The briefing will take place from 10-11.30am on Thursday March 17^th. If you’d like to attend please register now via the IBT website.

Last month’s briefing with CNN

We had an excellent briefing last month with Victoria Eastwood, Head of Planning at CNN in London. CNN has a strong reputation for its international reporting and the range of stories covered. Victoria explained how best to pitch ideas for TV and online – and the growing emphasis at CNN on original and distinctive reporting. A more detailed note on the briefing can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

Media reporting of migration criticised by new research report

The Ethical Journalism Network has published a new research report, Moving Stories – International Review of How Media Cover Migration, which looks at media coverage of the refugee crisis in 14 countries including the UK. The report concludes that media attention is necessary for the outside world to take note and to do something about humanitarian crises. With some neglected crises it asserts that the lack of funding is often linked to the lack of media coverage. The report documents certain trends in media coverage of refugees – there is a mix of good and bad coverage but this issue is often reported through the prism of politics. Coverage is dominated by numbers and emotions. Reporting is often simplistic with migrants seen as a threat and there is little reporting of the benefits of migration. It recommends that news organisations employ specialist reporters to cover this issue; ensure that their own staff come from diverse backgrounds; monitor their own coverage on a regular basis and have internal debates about the quality and range of their coverage. It recommends that NGOs become more skillful in their dealings with journalists.

http://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/assets/docs/054/198/8feb836-108e6c6.pdf

BBC3 now online

BBC3 has now been launched as an online only channel – the look and content is still evolving. In addition to full-length programmes, the network will offer a daily stream of content including short films, blogs and news and sport updates – delivered through a new online platform called The Daily Drop, combining original content with material produced by other BBC services including Trending and Radio 1’s Newsbeat.  IBT is in talks with BBC3 about producing online content on the issue of climate change.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree

Climate change film pitch

IBT is sponsoring a film pitch at this year’s Sheffield Documentary Festival. We are looking for filmmakers with projects that aim to engage mainstream audiences with climate change. The shortlisted entrants will receive pitch training and present their ideas in front of a panel of commissioning editors at Sheffield. The winner will receive £4,000 of development funding. The deadline for entries is March 31^st.

https://www.sheffdocfest.com/articles/365-international-broadcasting-trust-climate-change-pitch

BBC Charter update

The BBC Charter debate is gathering momentum. Two key committees have now reported, the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, and the House of Lords Communications Committee. The Lords Committee has argued in favour of the present scale and scope of the BBC, and its report quoted extensively from our written evidence and from Sophie Chalk, our Head of Advocacy, who gave oral evidence. The Commons Select Committee was more critical of the status quo and focused on governance, accountability, regulation, transparency and the Charter review process. It’s now clear that the BBC Trust will be abolished and in future the BBC will be regulated by Ofcom. But the Secretary of State is also considering more radical measures including a narrower remit for the BBC and a contestible fund so that the licence fee does not go entirely to the BBC. IBT is opposed to both of these proposals. All will be revealed when the DCMS publishes its White Paper in July. If you’d like to get involved in campaigning on the future of the BBC, please sign up to join Public Voice, a civil society wide grouping that we have been instrumental in setting up.

http://publicvoice.org.uk/

Lords Communications Committee report:

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/communications-committee/news-parliament-2015/bbc-charter-review-report-published/

CMS Select Committee report:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmcumeds/398/39802.htm

New code of conduct for reporting on children

The Ethical Journalism Network has also launched a new code of ethics to guide media organisations reporting on children. This should be of interest to IBT members that work with children. The new code focuses on the best way to protect the privacy and dignity of the child; participation and consent; and the responsibilities of journalists and picture editors.

http://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/58866-code-of-ethics-for-reporting-on-children-launched.html

New guidance for NGOs sending staff abroad

The solicitors Leigh Day have produced new guidance for employers sending staff to work abroad. There have been a number of recent legal cases where NGO employers have been held liable and their travel policies have been found wanting. Further information is available from Christine Tallon, a partner at Leigh Day.

http://www.2tg.co.uk/ImageLibrary/nw43_A_Practical_Guide_to.An_Employers_Duty.pdf

Trustee vacancies at IBT

IBT is recruiting new Trustees. Three of our Trustees will be stepping down in the summer as their terms of office have come to an end.  Since we are a membership-based organisation, it’s important that our Board of Trustees includes representatives of our member organisations. I will be sending out further details in an email to all members next week. If you are interested, look out for the email or get in touch. You do not need to have been a Trustee elsewhere to be eligible but you do need to have a clear understanding of the role of a Trustee. This is spelt out on the Charity Commission website.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-essential-trustee-what-you-need-to-know-cc3/the-essential-trustee-what-you-need-to-know-what-you-need-to-do

Dramatic growth in newspaper websites

Last month all the major UK newspapers recorded big increases in their web traffic. The Sun was up 25%; The Guardian and Mail were both up 12% and The Telegraph was up 14%. MailOnline remains by far the biggest UK newspaper website with more than 14 million daily users, followed by The Guardian, with The Telegraph in third place.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/18/sun-website-traffic-news-uk-abcs

In search of artists working on the issue of climate change

The Culture and Climate Change group has launched three artists’ residencies for artists or collectives working in any art form and living and working in the UK. Each of the winners will be awarded £10,000 for a year long residency to explore how society represents the range of possible future climates and develop their own artistic work within climate change research and policy networks.

http://www.creativecarbonscotland.com/cultureandcc/

Human Rights Watch Film Festival

The annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival starts takes place month and will feature a series of films and events from March 10-17. Highlights include Hooligan Sparrow which looks at activists on the run in China; If The Dead Could Speak a special event looking at the thousands of people who have died in Government custody in Syria and Desperate Journeys on Europe’s refugee crisis.

https://ff.hrw.org/

 Two events that may be of interest

The Rise of Women Journalists in the Arab World – at the EBRD tonight at 6pm

http://www.oneworldmedia.org.uk/news/book-your-ticket-rise-women-journalists-arab-world-1st-march#.VtWzVX2LTcs

Are You Being Heard? with Lenny Henry – at Goldsmiths on March 22^nd

http://www.gold.ac.uk/news/are-you-being-heard/

Best wishes

Mark

Briefing Notes: CNN

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February 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s February newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (DownloadPrint this Newsletter)

This month’s briefing with CNN

Later this month we’ll hear from Victoria Eastwood, Head of Planning at CNN. This is the first time we’ve heard from CNN and a great opportunity to get an inside track on how their London office works and the sort of stories they would be interested in. London is the biggest CNN’s bureau outside the US and a key hub for stories from Europe and Africa. The briefing will take place from 10-11.30am on Wednesday February 24^th. If you’d like to attend please register now via the IBT website.

Last month’s briefing with The Independent and The Daily Telegraph

We had a good briefing last month with two newspaper Foreign Editors, David Wastell from The Independent and Hannah Strange from The Daily Telegraph. Both said they were keen to receive ideas from NGOs – and gave useful practical tips on how to pitch to them and their colleagues and the sort of stories they were looking for. A more detailed note on the briefing can be found on the members’ page of the IBT website.

News analysis

We have now completed the first stage of our news analysis, looking in detail at coverage across UK TV, radio and online, for the two week period January 11-24. Several international stories featured prominently including Syria, the refugee crisis in Europe, Cameron’s negotiations with the EU and the Zika virus. One of the aims of the study is to look at the range of international stories covered. Now that the big international story of the day is more dominant, we’re also keen to examine whether this has this resulted in a narrowing of the range of stories covered by mainstream new bulletins. Another issue that we will be looking at is the range of voices – it appears that NGO voices are not being heard as much as we might expect. The next stage of this research is to gather opinions from news editors, NGOs and other commentators. If you would be interested in being interviewed for this research please let me know.

Reporting on refugees and the terrorist threat

Later this month Polis, the LSE media think tank, will be hosting a debate on media coverage of Syria, the refugees crisis and the terrorist threat. They will be asking what responsibility journalists have and whether coverage of these issues has been fair and impartial. The panel debate takes place at 7pm on Thursday February 11^th.

Tickets here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2015/12/04/migrants-terror-and-the-media-reporting-and-responsibilities-on-the-front-line/

Public Voice update

We have now had the first steering group meeting for Public Voice and we will soon be launching a major recruitment drive. Public Voice is a civil society coalition which we have set up to help secure the future of the BBC and Channel 4 as public service broadcasters. Both are under threat. Channel 4 may be privatized and the BBC may find that some licence fee income goes to other broadcasters. We will be holding a public event for anyone interested in supporting Public Voice – look out for an invitation to this. In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about Public Voice, please contact Sophie Chalk, our Head of Advocacy: sophie.chalk@btinternet.com

Climate change on BBC3

Last month we held a round table on the subject of climate change. A group of commissioners and producers from BBC3 met with experts and young people to brainstorm ways in which the new look BBC3 could engage its target audience with stories related to climate change. Now that BBC3 is going online there are many new opportunities for short form content and a season of programmes on climate change is now under active consideration.

Best wishes

Mark

Briefing Notes: The Independent and The Daily Telegraph

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January 2016 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s January newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Download/Print this Newsletter)

Briefing with The Independent and The Daily Telegraph

Our next briefing will be with the Foreign Editors of The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, David Wastell and Hannah Strange.  Although there has been much criticism of newspapers for reducing their foreign pages, these two papers have maintained a range of coverage, including a number of unique stories. David and Hannah are both keen to hear from IBT members about stories they could or should be covering. The briefing will take place at 10am on Thursday January 21^st, at the IBT offices in Southwark. There are a few places left. These will be allocated on a first come basis. Registration is via the member’s page on the IBT website. If you have already registered, you don’t need to do anything.

New news study

Later this month we will be conducting a quantitative analysis of news output on tv, radio and online. The analysis will cover the main bulletins and news programmes on BBC1, BBC2, Channel 4, ITV, Sky and Channel 5, and some key radio and online content, over a two week period. It appears that the range of stories covered and the number of unique stories has diminished in recent years, so this is one issue that we will be investigating. Our last study, The World in Focus, was published in 2009 and provided us with a good evidence base for lobbying broadcasters. We would be interested in hearing from any IBT members who have views on the changing nature of tv coverage of global events and issues. The final report will be published in the spring.

The future of Channel 4

The debate over the future of Channel 4 is gathering pace. Some former tv grandees like Michael Grade have surprisingly come out in favour of privatization; most of the tv industry has come out against, including Peter Kosminsky, the Wolf Hall director, writing in The Guardian today.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/04/channel-privatised-disaster-channel-4-risk-taking-programmes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Peter is right. If Channel 4 is privatised it’s likely that its more risky content will disappear, including international current affairs. Channel 4 has a statutory duty to broadcast international coverage and particularly ‘voices from around the world.’ IBT was instrumental in securing this aspect of the Channel 4 remit, when we successfully lobbied MPs and peers for its inclusion in the Digital Economy Bill, a number of years ago. It’s likely that a privatized Channel 4 would seek to dilute the remit.

BBC3 going online

Next month BBC3 will go online and cease to broadcast as a tv channel. This is a big experiment for the BBC. The channel will still commission the long form international current affairs content for which it is best known, from presenters like Stacey Dooley and Reggie Yates. But this will be broadcast on BBC1 and 2 instead. There will be a big increase in short form content specially commissioned for the online channel. We have been talking to Damian Kavanagh, the Controller of BBC3, and encouraging him to commission a season on climate change. We will be holding a round table with the BBC3 commissioning team, independent producers and some climate change experts later this month.

Sheffield DocFest

This year we will be working with Sheffield DocFest again. It’s becoming an increasingly important event for documentary makers and tv professionals from around the world. We’ll be organizing a film competition and panel event to promote tv coverage of climate change and its likely impacts. DocFest has also just launched a new online platform called Postcards, and a film fund, to support new and established short form documentary talent.

https://sheffdocfest.com/articles/353-just-so-and-sheffield-doc-fest-launch-postcards-online-platform-and-just-so-film-fund-to-support-new-and-established-short-form-documentary-film-talent

One World Media Awards

The call for entries is now open for this year’s prestigious One World Media Awards, which celebrates excellence in international media content. The deadline for applications is February 4^th 2016. The awards will take place in June.

http://www.oneworldmedia.org.uk/awards

CBBC

It’s good to see that CBBC continues to commission international factual content for children. If you missed it, Boy on the Bicycle is still available on the iPlayer. This single film ran as part of the My Life strand and followed a group of children living in Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. It was made in conjunction with UNICEF.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/cbbc/episode/b06s65rj/my-life-series-7-4-the-boy-on-the-bicycle

Whicker’s World Foundation

The newly established Whicker’s World Foundation has announced a number of awards to encourage film makers to develop their own authored documentary content. The deadline for applications is January 31^st 2016. http://whickersworldfoundation.com/awards/

Best wishes

Mark

December 2015 Newsletter

Welcome to IBT’s December newsletter with an update on our work and relevant news from the media industry.    (Print this Newsletter)

Training session on Instagram and Snapchat

Our next training event takes place next week. We still have a couple of places left so let me know if you’d like to attend. It will cover the use of images in social media, particularly Instagram and Snapchat. The session is introductory – and aimed at users who are familiar with social media but have limited experience of these two platforms. It will take place from 9.30-12.30 on Thursday December 10^th at the IBT offices in Southwark. This is a free event – if you are receiving this newsletter, you are eligible to attend.

Briefing with Tulip Mazumdar

Our last briefing was with Tulip Mazumdar, the BBC’s global health correspondent. She explained how the BBC’s health unit works and gave a number of suggestions for the best way to pitch to the unit. Tulip has a wide brief and is keen to report on health issues that don’t normally make the news – such as neglected tropical diseases. She encouraged everyone present to send her ideas for future news reports. A detailed note on what Tulip said is on the members’ page of the IBT website.

IBT expresses concern about the future of Channel 4

We have written to a number of newspapers to express concern about the future of Channel 4. The Government has confirmed that it is considering privatization. Our understanding is that this is being driven by DCMS, not the Treasury, and the motivation is ideological rather than to raise revenue. A decision will be announced early next year. If the Government does go ahead, it will need to introduce primary legislation and the proposal is likely to be scrutinized by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. We are opposed to the privatization of Channel 4 because we believe it will mean that certain programmes will suffer as money is diverted from the programme budget to shareholders. Lord Burns, the Channel 4 Chair and former Treasury mandarin, confirmed this week that if privatisation goes ahead, Channel 4 News is unlikely to survive in its present form. Political opposition is growing, so please mention the issue in any conversations you have with parliamentarians. If you would like a full briefing on the threat to Channel 4, contact Sophie Chalk, our head of advocacy, who is leading on this for IBT.

sophie.chalk@btinternet.com

Unreported World

Channel 4’s weekly current affairs strand, Unreported World, is back on the air next spring and the production team are keen to receive programme ideas for stories that could be filmed in January and February. They have a particular interest in the Middle East. The last series was one of the best to date and included films from Cambodia, Cameroon, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, South Africa and Sicily. If you have a story idea, do get in touch with Monica Garnsey, the series producer, and mention IBT in your email.

monica.garnsey@qsmedia.tv

New money for the World Service

As part of the recent Defence Review, the Government announced a big increase in funding for the World Service. It will receive an extra £85m a year from 2017-20. In effect, this means that the present budget for the World Service will be ring fenced and will not be cut disproportionately when the new licence fee comes in. The extra money will be spent across the board – with enhanced TV services for Africa, new radio and digital services for Ethiopia and Eritrea, additional language services for Nigeria and India, new radio services for North Korea and enhanced digital and TV services in Russian. This expansion will help the World Service move towards its goal of reaching an audience of 500 million people weekly by 2022. It will also help the BBC to respond to the challenge posed by growing investment in other global news services such as CCTV and RT.

European Social Documentary

The deadline for applications for next year’s ESoDoc training is January 29^th. This is an innovative training scheme that brings together documentary filmmakers, graphic designers, programmers, game developers, journalists and those working in NGO communications. The aim of the training is to help the participants develop crossmedia projects related to social, political or human rights issues.

http://www.esodoc.eu/

New book on international NGOs

Last month saw the publication of International NGO Engagement, Advocacy, Activism. The author, Professor Helen Yanacopulos of The Open University, interviewed a number of IBT members when she was researching the book. Its aim is to investigate the role of INGOs in the UK and abroad, to interrogate what they are seeking to achieve and the methods that they use, particularly communications. The book argues that NGOs need to utilize political values and political spaces more strategically if they are to be better agents of change. If you’d like to buy a copy, a 30% discount is available for IBT members (use the discount code PM15THIRTY).

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/international-ngo-engagement-advocacy-activism-helen-yanacopulos/?isb=9781137569547

Best wishes

Mark