2012InternalComms_Week+ahead+message

During the Partnership and Communication meeting 2012, one of the key activities to work on that was highlighted was '**internal communication**'. A task force was set up to organise this. The task force held a virtual meeting , leading to a list of priorities - to be worked out in more detail.

This page looks at the details of '**Week ahead email message**'.


 * Background: **
 * There is already a pre-existing concept whereby Meron (from Addis), Jacqueline (from Nairobi), Andrew (from Asia) and Boni (from Southern Africa) compile a weekly email of what is going on around ILRI, region-by-region. Thus, we have the ready-laid foundations from which we can just tweak improvements.
 * The internal-comms taskforce saw this concept as having a relatively high level of impact, whilst also being reasonably easy to implement. Any tweaks to the existing format should be minor as it's quite functional as-is.
 * Want to avoid over-inflating the word count, however we do want more descriptive activity listings. Important to find a balance.


 * What steps to follow: **

In the upcoming Week Ahead email
 * Make the announcement more descriptive by adding objective of the event and link it to a website/wiki etc...
 * Basically we want to provide the reader with a short call-to-action if they are looking for more information.
 * Work on the e-mail design to book mark all the regions so that it makes it easy to navigate
 * Share the print template to Nairobi, Asia and Southern Africa so that they could duplicate what is being done in Addis
 * Make sure that we get updates from Western Africa

=Who does what when = > Meron, Jackie, Andrew and Boni to communicate that this is now expected to the individuals responsible
 * Individuals charged with compiling regional/departmental activity lists will be responsible for including the relevant hyperlinks for Meron/Jacqueline in their summarises.
 * Meron to send out the printable version of the template to Jackie/Muthoni, Andrew and Boni so that the same happens in all the regions
 * Jackie to extract only the Nairobi part and send it through yammer every Monday and same with Asia (Andrew) to send it out to the Asia group and Boni for the Southern Africa group if there is one
 * Andrew to create a bitly.com account for the Week Ahead emails so we can monitor the click-through rate.
 * Involve Peter or Bruce to get updates from West Africa as Meron and Jackie did not succeed so far.

=What might we need =
 * One general e-mail message mentioning all the changes that's going to happen with the impacts probably from Peter or Bruce.

(Comments ELB): good work, simple but effective improvements. I would also do 2 things, personally: - Develop the email message as HTML to indeed have bookmark links to specific sub-sections (Asia, NBO etc.) - Start with the regional offices. There is so much going on in NBO and ADD that we are quite sure people will check those sections anyhow, so by putting the emphasis on the regional offices we recognise their importance and put due emphasis on their activities (and put the onus on them to update their activities ;) For West Africa we might need to target someone specifically to check what's going on. If I get a chance to travel to Bamako I might be able to make this work a bit better but I definitely think we need a targeted approach here.