Take Action
In the early stages of a response (i.e., the first few months), for smaller emergencies with a shorter timescale (i.e., less than six months), or when there is limited community engagement and accountability experience and capacity within your organization, or when there is limited funds and human resources available for the response – ensure you meet the below minimum standards as you use the rest of this toolkit.
Minimum actions for participation:
- Assessments: Understand community needs, capacities, and context by conducting a secondary data review and conducting an in-crisis rapid Information Needs Assessments (INA). Without assessing needs, capacities, and context, there is a risk you will fail to meet people’s needs, undermine local capacity, or do more harm than good. This damages credibility and leads to a loss of time and resources while mistakes are corrected. Discuss the assessment in advance with key people in the community, including leaders, heads of community groups and associations, and local authorities. Ask for advice on how to conduct the assessment and if other organizations have already carried out assessments. Provide information on the purpose of the assessment, what happens when it is completed, staff codes of conduct and behavior, and how people can ask questions or raise concerns (ensuring staff are briefed on answering questions without raising expectations).
- Design: Discuss with a mix of community representatives including leaders, heads of groups and associations, and local authorities response plans and how your organization should work with them to design your program. At a minimum, conduct indirect consultation with frontline staff on program design (22) to empower them to enable participation of affected people and ensure at least one person on your team is local to the community. As much as is possible, partnerships to strengthen the efforts of local groups should always be your first option to strengthen and support existing local channels of communication, before developing your own channel or mechanism for communication. Check that activities will meet the needs and priorities of the community and ask about the best ways to deliver them. If feasible, discuss what should happen at the end of the program and how the community and/ or other stakeholders could take over activities. Coordinate internally and externally to avoid causing frustration in communities.
- Implementation: Communicate clearly who your responsive information service is providing support to, and why, to manage expectations. This includes the languages you provide support in, and the geographic areas for which you can provide information on (particularly related to service mapping). Train frontline communicators to handle questions, feedback, and critical feedback. Prioritize the production of informational content on the basis of assessments and trends analysis of inquiries from two-way communications.
- Monitoring and evaluation: Discuss feedback received through two-way communication frequently and proactively collect feedback on client satisfaction of your responsive information services.