Civic Innovation Lab, Abuja.

Civic Hive is the innovation center of BudgIT, founded in 2017, to help accelerate anyone who has a passion and a plan to create a solution to the social problems around.  One of the critical goals of the Civic Hive is to support existing nonprofits with technological solutions. Hence, we commenced the masterclass series on Creative Communication for nonprofits on Tuesday,  February 13, 2017, where we trained 55 Civil Society Organisations in Lagos. We scaled the training to Civic Labs Abuja on May 3, 2018, where we hosted 56 members of different Civil Society Groups in Nigeria.

The workshop focused on improving CSO interaction with stakeholders through their various communication channels. The workshop covered three thematic areas;

• Improved Storytelling for Advocacy
• Social Media for Advocacy
• Data Visualisation for Advocacy

Abiola Afolabi, Communications lead, BudgIT opened the floor by introducing the participants to the idea behind the Civic Hive brand, the mission, and the vision of the project. Abiola spoke on the necessity of bringing the event to the city of Abuja.

Oluseun Onigbinde, Lead Partner, BudgIT, spoke extensively on connecting with the emotional dots of the messages put on social media. He emphasized that humans are more ‘’Emotional than rational’’. He stressed this is why people tend to act before they think.

He spoke about how sensationalism thrives in the media and why Civil Society must put this into consideration when crafting its messages. Also, he warned against CSO’s information asymmetry so as not to distort the essence of their existence.

BudgIT Research Lead, Atiku Samuel critically examined the use of data for advocacy, this session highlighted how CSOs could leverage existing data that ties to their mission, how to source for different types of data, and most importantly, how to understand big data. In his presentation, Atiku said, “always look for the primary data if the secondary data is not relatively available to you as an organization.”

Abiola Afolabi, Communications lead, BudgIT took participants on the importance of making data appealing through the use of visualizations. She mentioned 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and that high-quality infographics are 30 times more likely to be than text articles. The participants learned the rules of visualization, different types of graphs and charts and became familiar with data visualization platforms; Infogram and Datawrapper. These are necessary tools to develop interesting infographics.

The class was divided into three different groups, this was where they all had the chance to do some hands-on, they were all given different real-life scenarios to work with. Each group came up with different ideas on how to communicate better with their solutions which emanates from the groups. The session was an eye-opener as to the sessions that have previously been held by each speaker.

To close the session, Iyanuoluwa Bolarinwa, Civic Hive Community Manager, engaged participants in the use of social media for advocacy. He emphasized various social media platforms to engage their audiences, careful deliberation on the tone and body of the message and presented relevant examples of how organizations strategically communicate and keep people interested in their activities through social engagements. The session examined how to track impressions and outreach on different social platforms, how to take advantage of trends to increase followership, and prompt responses to queries on these platforms.  He further emphasized, ‘’brands should allow organic growth and avoid bots’’.