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 non-profits with technological solutions. Hence, we commenced the masterclass series on creative communication for non-profits on Tuesday,  February 13, 2017, where we trained 55 civil society organizations. The workshop concentrated on improving CSO interaction with stakeholders through their various communication channels. The creative communication masterclass series covered four thematic areas;

• Improved Storytelling
• Website Revamp
• Social Media Management
• Data Visualisation

Gabriel Okeowo, General Manager, BudgIT opened the floor by introducing the participants to the idea behind the Civic Hive brand, the mission, and the vision of the project. 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.”

Social media is an important forum to stimulate engagements and keep the conservation going beyond the walls of a room. Abayomi Akinbo, Project Manager at BudgIT engaged participants on 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 followerships and prompt responses to queries on these platforms.

Abiola Afolabi, Civic Hive Manager 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.

To close the session, Iyanuoluwa Bolarinwa, Community Manager,  introduced the participants to Civic Hive Image Bank, where they can access quality local images that directly ties to their mission at no cost. The Creative communication workshop was an overall success as participants were fully engaged and they parted with new ideas of engagement.

What out for the next series coming up in Abuja very soon!