Global Branding Through Local Storytelling
Our digital devices are never far from our finger tips. There is nothing like the rush of scrolling. But how to you take advantage of it to promote your global brand? How do you bring your in-country work to digital in real-time, weaving it effectively into your global brand story?
I was asked to introduce a digital strategy to highlight the work of a humanitarian organization’s projects and stakeholders in Asia and Africa. The desire – and the ultimate challenge – was to bring country projects and stories to the forefront of their digital storytelling.
The goal was to ensure that any visitor to their brand channels should know within seconds where they work and the nature of their work. Normally? Not a problem. However, the eight countries we were targeting were the poorest and least secure of any in the world. Getting information out quickly and developing a means to do so was made that much harder by daily technology and communication challenges that you and I take for granted. So what did we do?
Focus on talent. We moved from using an external agency to bringing in a digital coordinator on staff to create programmatic knowledge that could be translated into compelling content. We also bridged the time zone gap by placing a digital team member in Europe – on a similar time zone as Africa and just a few hours difference with Asia.
Open channels of communication between country officers/representatives. The onus lies with communications and marketing to take the lead here. Using a messaging platform (Slack/WhatsApp) to maintain an open channel with a weekly check-in can help alleviate any information barriers.
Train one or two members in each country office on capturing brand reels, stories and photos. Encourage them to capture moments in the field, behind the scenes, a day in the life and essays to give an essence of what life is like and the challenges and opportunities are. At this stage, quality will come by encouraging quantity. The training can be added on to a larger meeting at headquarters to save on travel and budget expenditures.
Encourage your country staff to engage with your global brand channels by sharing content, liking, commenting and where appropriate and interacting with each other on lessons learned in the field. Your staff will become more comfortable with engagement, while expanding awareness in-country within their networks. This will help them become more comfortable with the power of digital storytelling and tools to harness it to showcase their projects and impact.
Over a six-month period, we were able to weave in stories of our work in Bangladesh, India, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia and South Africa by actively engaging country staff. Through continual communication between the digital team and the country teams, a seamless communication channel began to open enabling us to promote our work in real time and to create story themes between countries.