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The majority of funding required for responsive information services are for human resources. A team of frontline staff that is prepared, trusted, and empowered to manage the activities of a responsive information service is the most vital driving force of success. The staff and skills you need to operate your responsive information service will vary depending on your organization, scale, and the channels you are using. Consider the core functions – or roles - required to manage a responsive information service and identify if these functions can be covered by your existing team, if they are covered by other response actors, or if you need to hire or form partnerships for additional support.
| NOTE - Above all, remember that information and communication is nuanced and extremely context specific. A team that represents your target audience - and empowering them to make decisions – is the most practical thing you can do to strengthen quality and outcomes. |
> See Module 3.1 Build Your Team for guidance on hiring the right people.
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Core functions for RISE human resources include:
- Strategic leadership / coordination / project management: Someone who oversees the project and is responsible for the overall strategy.
- Investigating and verifying information and developing content: This is a person or team of people who manages the content strategy for the responsive information service. They develop relationships with sources and work with legal advisors and other sectoral specialists, triangulating and verifying information with multiple sources following journalistic principles. They develop informational content based on trends in information needs and package it in ways that are accessible and appropriate for the channels they are shared through. They also support frontline communicators to respond to client questions with verified information.
- Service mapping: This is a person or team of people who will oversee efforts to map essential services that clients request information on. They develop relationships with service providers, gathering important information about accessibility and ensuring consistency, while keeping a mapping of services up to date.
- Frontline communication: This is a person or team of people who manages two–way communication with clients of your information service. They answer client questions using verified information, help clients navigate available information, point them in the right direction of available services, and show they are being listened to. They also track trends in client questions and escalate and/or provide referrals for acute protection concerns.
Considerations for determining the human resources you need:
- Strategic leadership: Ideally, they have experience in humanitarian communications and are capable of leading and providing feedback on information content and frontline communication. This person might cover other core functions, so depending on the level of additional capacity, they may dedicate between 25% - 100% of their time to the project.
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Investigating and verifying information and developing content: Ideally, they have experience in journalism, communications, humanitarian response, and potentially graphic design, social media, or other specific areas.
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- Consider that if you are working in multiple languages, it is most ideal if the person(s) covering this function speaks and can write in the languages(s) you are covering. Otherwise, you may need to consider hiring translation support, which can be extremely costly. See more on working across languages below.
- When considering the capacity required, note that verifying information requested by clients and keeping information up to date requires a significant time investment. Sharing information that is inaccurate poses critical risks, and therefore it is important to ensure that the person(s) taking on this role have enough capacity. What are the priority information needs clients have identified? Are they very similar or markedly different across client groups? How big is the geography you are covering (and therefore, how much does the information need to be tailored to each specific context)? Is this information readily available (through humanitarian coordination mechanisms, government, etc.), or will it require significant investment to verify? How quickly is information changing, and therefore how often can you expect to need to update content?
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Service mapping: This function may not need to be covered by your team if there are existing service mapping efforts in the context that meets your needs (See Module 2.1). In that case, service mapping could be handled in partnership with another organization as overseen by the strategic lead, for example.
- Especially early in an emergency, a large component of information requests often relate to accessing services. How big is the geography you are covering (and therefore, how much effort is required to have quality service mapping in each geographic area)? What existing service mapping efforts are ongoing, and what would it take to build on these without sacrificing timeliness in responding to client requests?
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Frontline communication: This function can be covered in a variety of ways, which may include hiring staff directly, working with community mobilizers, leaders, or groups, training existing sectoral frontline staff who interact with the target group, partnering with government or news agencies, etc., or some combination. The amount of capacity you need for frontline communication will always be context dependent.
- Think about the channels you are using for communication, the scale of the target audience you are serving and their access to the channel(s) you are using, and the geographic areas you are covering to estimate the volume of questions you can expect to receive from clients on a daily basis. Consider how many information requests frontline communicators can reasonably respond to through that channel in a day. For example, at an information desk, perhaps one frontline communicator can serve 20 clients in a week.
- If you are using online or remote channels (a Facebook group or hotline, for example), and community access to those channels is high, you may expect to have a higher volume of information requests than you would for face-to-face modalities.
- Moreover, if you are using a public social media channel(s), it is paramount to ensure that you have enough staff to regularly monitor and moderate the public page for hate speech, illegal activity, criticism and complaints, etc. (See Tool 31. Frontline Communication Handbook).
- Consider that if you are working in multiple languages, it is crucial that the people covering this function speak the languages(s) you are covering. Otherwise, you will need daily interpretation support. See more on working across languages below.
Other potential functions when working across multiple languages:
It is crucial to provide information in the mother tongue(s) of your target audience. Working across languages is often a key challenge when communicating with communities, and is especially challenging in RISE interventions due to the speed and volume of information production and responses to client questions. Because of this, serving multiple languages has significant impacts on staffing and budgeting. Consider that to work in multiple languages, you need daily translation and interpretation capacity – either through hiring staff who speak those languages, or through engaging with external actors (which can be extremely costly). See Table 8 for more information on options to ensure the inclusion of diverse languages in RISE interventions.
- Interpretation: Even if frontline communicators speak the language(s) you are covering, it is likely that clients who speak other languages or require sign language interpretation may contact your information service. If this need is significant, you might consider having on-call interpreters who you can hire when you need them.
- Translation: If the person(s) covering the function of investigating and verifying information and developing content do not speak and write in the language(s) you are covering, it can be most practical and cost-effective to hire a full-time translator to quickly translate information.
Table 8. Options to ensure the inclusion of diverse languages in RISE interventions
*Please note that this list is not exhaustive, but it can provide a starting point of ideas. When you consider how to manage working across languages, work with coordination forums to identify opportunities to join efforts or identify human resources (See Module 2.1).
| Type | Description | Pros | Cons/Considerations |
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| Staff |
Hiring dedicated translation and interpretation staff on RISE teams. Recruiting speakers of diverse languages directly within content creation and frontline communication teams, including key minority languages used by affected com-munities. |
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Service agreements, Consultancies |
Alternate contract type to engage full-time translation or interpretation, or on-call interpretation support for frontline communicators. Part-time language support or support for a specific scope of work, for example:
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| Community volunteers, Incentive workers | Engaging with community volunteers or networks to ensure representation of diverse languages (including minority languages) in content creation and frontline communication. May include, for example, community-based committees, protection action groups, community outreach workers, etc. Community-based accountability mechanisms or client responsiveness mechanisms can inform content creation. |
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| Translation technologies | Machine Translation (MT) and translation management, such as Transifex, GlobalLink, Google Translate or DeepL; Computer- Assisted Technology (CAT), such as Matecat. |
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| Partners |
Modalities to engage partners may include partnership agreements, donations (funding or contributions in-kind), Memorandums of Understanding, etc. (See Module 2.4.2). Based on their areas of expertise, partners may have unique skills or entry points to facilitate inclusion of diverse languages:
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| Government bodies, line ministries | Local and national government bodies may offer official messages in local languages or have official translation or interpretation services. |
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