How To Use the Roadmap Copy
What is a digital community?
A group of people:
- who come together online for a defined purpose,
- who engage on content shared with the community (both made by community or the community managers),
- and for whom engagement is focused on purpose and participate because they feel there is a benefit to it.
What can a digital community bring to CSOs implementing programmes?
Digital communities have the following value propositions:
- Providing the ability to implement programmes via the digital space
- Mitigating risk: increasing resilience and sustainability
- Awareness raising and campaigning
- Scale reach and engagement
- Delivering access to information
- Reaching specific groups (reaching young people, connecting dispersed and/or disenfranchised populations)
- Accessing the intelligence of many
- Using user-generated data as evidence for advocacy
- Raising funds
- Increasing legitimacy of the organisation.
What is the roadmap?
Based on learning from digital communities across the world, we created a roadmap that consists of the key building blocks needed to create a digital community for social change.
The roadmap provides a framework to capture, organise, create and transfer our knowledge related to building digital communities for social change. Each building block of the roadmap corresponds to a module that assembles both internal and external resources and tools.
The roadmap also includes the decision tree, a tool which can help teams:
- Determine whether building a digital community is the right method to achieve their desired goal
- Assess if organisations have the right required resources to build a digital community (budget, partnerships, human resources)
- Provide insights on why previous experiences related to setting up digital communities (might not) have led to the expected results
Why did RNW Media develop the roadmap?
RNW Media developed the roadmap in order to:
- Capture, structure, and order current RNW Media organisational knowledge
- Compare the captured approaches to RNW Media’s existing best practices
- Implement streamlined and structured onboarding for new team members in RNW Media’s approach
- Roll out new programmes and projects in different regions worldwide
- Strengthen RNW Media’s current programmes and projects
- Understand regional differences and continuously improve through feedback
- Provide training of trainers to local teams thus structuring their knowledge and enabling them to offer specific products and services externally
- Share expertise through online and offline activities
How have we approached it?
We captured RNW Media’s working approach, actively involving Love Matters members across the network who could provide us with insights about the work on the ground. We reviewed both internal and external resources and assembled some best practices on creating digital communities and circulating SRHR information.
How can I use this roadmap?
Each module on the roadmap focuses on a specific building block, all of which need to be completed in order to build and maintain a successful digital community.
As the roadmap consists of an array of learning modules, these can also be used on a needs basis to provide training and capacity building on specific areas of implementation to strengthen existing digital communities.
Together with your team, you can go through all the building blocks to learn more about the steps to create a digital community, or only pick-and-choose those modules that are relevant to you and your organisation.
What are the educational/learning benefits of this roadmap?
After going through the roadmap, you and your team will:
- Have increased capacities on different levels of building digital communities for social change
- Learn about the best practices through the presented case studies in implementing digital communities for social change
- Be able to apply the various tools, templates and guidelines provided by the modules to build digital communities for social change
- Become thought leaders in the process of building digital communities for social change.
How can I get the most out of this learning experience?
Besides carefully going through the learning module(s), there are several things you can do to get the most out of this learning experience:
- Share your knowledge with your team and/or organisation
- Pick out the most relevant aspects of your learning journey and implement it into your projects
- Keep track of your learning experiences in your learning journal and completing assignments to “learn by doing” through the process
- Keep on discussing the content within your teams.
How can I use the skills and knowledge I gain?
This is country context and project specific. After going through the module(s) relevant to your project, to your role, or to your organisation, think of how to roll it out internally:
- How can you share the skills and knowledge with your teams?
- How can you apply the skills and knowledge to your projects?
- How can you incorporate continuous feedback into your newly adapted projects?
- How can you make sure that your newly adapted projects make the intended impact?
- How can you ensure the sustainability of your projects?
What comes after the roadmap and its building blocks?
The roadmap for building digital communities for social change is a living knowledge resource, that we aim to continuously update & improve. These modules and their content are constantly reviewed and updated to ensure that we remain at the forefront of innovation in the field.
For this reason, the roadmap should be seen as a living lab to test in new and existing interventions. We also invite those who use it and implement it to:
- Share feedback on the modules and their application
- Share insights on the modules or discoveries made
- Share demonstrable impact from the roadmap process
- Provide us with resources you find useful or add to the building of stronger communities for social change
- Share new methods, tools or innovative best practices
- Become involved in the testing of new modules.
