Communications update - SBCC Summit - Notes from November 7, 2017 meeting

Hi - in order to help communication across the various committees and groups planning the SBCC Summit in Nusa Dua, please see below the notes from the most recent Communications sub-group meeting. Please note some links may not work as you are not part of the Communications sub-group space. It you do wish to go deeper and look at some of the posts that are linked please let me know and we can provided access. For now the intent is to give you the overview.  

The agenda for the November 7, 2017 meeting can be seen at this link.

Notes from the meeting:

1. General check-in

The meeting commenced with a general check-in across all people present. There were no major issues reported. Everyone was engaged in getting the word out through their networks and communication platforms. 

2. Update on present number of registrations and abstracts submissions

At the time of the meeting there were 47 people registered and 27 abstracts submissions. JHU will provide an update soon. There was one important clarification around registrations. Only some of the 47 at that time had paid using credit cards. Others had requested invoices. It was highloghted that people requesting invoices had 14 days to pay - if there was no payment at that time gthen they would be removed from the registration list. So, the numbers could fluctuate.

The numbers served to highlight the priority importance of a focus on registrations and abstracts - in particular abstracts with the deadline on November 27, 2017, just 20 days away. We were all in agreement that communications from each of our platforms over the next week to 10 days should highlight the abstracts submission process. 

3. Communications data

Most of the partners in this sub-group had provided udpates on their communications processes in support of the Summit. The relevant excel file compiling these is attached. Some key highlights from that data follow. (Please note that one big gap - still not filled as I write these notes 7 days later - is the data from the Summit web site itself - user sessions, page views, geo, etc. Would be good to get that from JHU as soon as possible please.)

- Emails sent - 181,574

- Emails opened - 52,666

- Facebook people reached - 8,665 (NB lots of data missing here)

- Twitter impressions - 9,035  (NB lots of data missing here also)

This is just partial core data at this time, as explained above. Other orgs outside the CommS group will also be communicating of course.  And many of us will be sending additional notes soon to our networks.

4, Hashtag

We were all in agreement that the hashtag should be #SBCCSummit2018 But post the meeting there was a request to please use the hastag from the Addis Summit for continuity reasons - #SBCCSummit  In a quick email round post our meeting people agreed.

5. Social Media Strategy

The sub-group considered the options paper developed for the social media strategy.

There were 3 key issues presented as core considerations. Those considerations (click hyperlinks below) with the conclusions from the meeting were:

 a. Discrete to Summit or across all of our (and more) platforms?

Though the case was made for at least a specific Facebook page the conclusion reached was that we should not set up any social media spaces specific to the Summit. That we should all mobilise and use each of our existing social media spaces, and those of other organisations that wish to engage, and link those processes through the hashtag #SBCCSummit. Each platform will explore how best to establish threads on its platforms using the hashtag as the identifier in order to bring in overall sharing, dialogue and debate from multiple platforms to be a feature on their platform.    

b. Reflective or actively facilitated?

There was a commitment from all to actively faciliate both within our own processes - posts, questions, notifications of upcoming events and deadlines, images, etc - and between platforms - eg "Over at C4D this question has been raised ..." 

c. Receiving or proactivey reaching out

The conclusion of this item was to be proactive. We are going to ask the Steering Committee, Secretariat, other sub-groups to identify key policy makers, funders, think-tank people and researchers in non-SBCC roles, but who are influential in development policywithin countries or internationally. We will then seek to identify their social media presence and will follow, join, like, etc in hope that they will return the favour to each our accounts. Then we will have them engaged at minimum.