Deliver: Building Your Team

Deliver: Build the right team (with the right mix of technical skills and subject expertise) so you can deliver the successful digital product. 

Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance.

Verna Myers, Diversity and Inclusion expert

Inclusion and diversity

• Inclusive: We believe that together is the only way forward. We convene user-owned digital communities that are a safe place to talk about sensitive topics. (Source: RNW Media Diversity and Inclusion policy)

• Diverse community: A group of people with diverse characteristics who are linked by social ties, share common perspectives, and engage in joint action in geographical locations or settings. Community may be defined similarly but experienced differently by people with diverse backgrounds. (Source: Macqueen, K. M. “What Is community? An evidence-based definition for participatory public health”, American Journal of Public Health, 2001 December; 91(12): 1929–1938.)

At the heart of RNW Media is the inclusive approach and through our recruitment, engagement, contents, stakeholder and tech approaches we strive to be inclusive on the level of demographics and ideologies. In this section we will detail how we strive to set-up inclusive teams and build inclusive partnerships.

Representative teams

To be able to build truly inclusive civic spaces, it is essential that those creating, maintaining and promoting these platforms and communities reflect the diversity of society.

When you build a team, you should consider including people of different:

• Ages
• Genders
• Regions
• Races
• Religions
• Tribes
• Socio-economic classes

If you have moderators in your digital community, it is essential that they are also representative of the online communities in the countries in which they operate in. As the Love Matters digital communities provide a platform for young people to discuss sensitive issues and taboo topics in SRH with differing viewpoints, the team should reflect a diversity of views, backgrounds and experiences. The teams managing the Love Matters member platforms, for example, will be exposed to many different opinions and identities, it is therefore important that team members are given a comprehensive on-boarding to be able to moderate discussion effectively and create diverse and inclusive content.

Age matters!

The overwhelming majority of the Love Matters staff are youth themselves – with most being under the age of 35 years old, but the average of teams varies significantly. In 2020, the average age of the Love Matters content creators in China was 26, while for Love Matters Arabic, only half the team were under the age of 35 years old (the reason being that all moderators are qualified doctors).

From content creators to moderators, young people are the essential foundation of all that we do. In addition to this, all Love Matters network members have strong partnerships with youth-led or youth-focused organisations in their countries, but the capacity in which they work together varies from being youth-allies to full implementing partners.

ENGAGING YOUNG PEOPLE IN ALL THEIR DIVERSITY

Engaging young people as collaborators, problem solvers, and change agents for the development and implementation of the digital health interventions is essential.

Meaningful engagement of young people is an inclusive and mutually respected partnership between young people and adults whereby power is shared, respective contributions are valued, and young people’s ideas, perspectives, skills, and strengths are integrated into the design and delivery of interventions, while empowering young people throughout the process.

Young people are drivers of change, especially changes in their own health, and thus careful planning should be done to ensure that young people are meaningfully engaged through the inception, development and implementation of the digital health intervention, as part of the project team.

Having young people engaged in this process is mutually beneficial for young people and developers. Young people have an opportunity to contribute their ideas and experiences to the development of the intervention that they can use, and the developers get a better understanding of the population they are trying to reach and create a better product that is more likely to succeed.

In practice these can range from having one or more young persons involved in each of the activities for planning, development and implementation of the intervention to forming a youth advisory board to consult throughout the process.

Read more here: WHO 2020: Youth-centred digital health interventions: a framework for planning, developing and implementing solutions with and for young people.

Geographically inclusive

Geographical inclusiveness means that we have diverse teams, in areas that are not only the capital city, united by a common strategy and inclusive editorial policies, that can contribute to a diversity of narrative.

GEOGRAPHICAL INCLUSIVENESS

• Where countries are typically divided along geographic faults it is important to include geographical representation

Example: Love Matters Nigeria ensures geographically inclusive teams with representatives from the geographic north and south regions. 

Gender balance

We also actively strive to ensure that our teams include a healthy gender balance. However, our global experience has shown that it’s difficult to recruit and retain female content producers for a number of reasons. Young women are disadvantaged and restricted in many of our programme countries where it comes to access to education, the internet and IT skills. There also tends to be fewer female graduates from media schools. Many women lack training and confidence to share their content/opinions online. Women bloggers are stigmatised online and trolling forces many to leave. In addition, women tend to stop working as content producers when they marry or have a family.

The Love Matters members use the different methods to encourage more female participation:

• Through moderation and community management strategies, female contributors and writers are given a safer platform to write about issues that are relevant to them.
• Encourage more women to write under pseudonyms if they do not want to publish under their name.
• Capacity building of female media professionals.
• Ensuring partners have full editorial decision making in terms of topics and format (within the scope of the Theory of Change), to encourage more women to join the team as contributors/writers.
• Encouraging content for women, by women, increases women’s participation. For example, in Huna Libya, Libya’s first woman vlogger Amani contributes to our platform, discussing social and gender issues.
• Redress any gender imbalance by encouraging the teams to always question the gender-inclusiveness and friendliness of our content and approach.

Marginalised groups

Women are not the only marginalised communities in the countries we work in. However, as mentioned above, it is not always easy to ensure a truly diverse workforce in some of the countries where RNW Media’s partners are active due to security and other issues. In these countries, other strategies are implemented to ensure different youth voices are represented, for instance, off-line consultations with marginalised youth groups.

Love Matters Nigeria

LGBTQI young people are one of the most marginalised communities in Nigeria, and often face legal and social challenges and can be excluded or ignored in mainstream communication. To reflect the community’s voices, Love Matters Nigeria partners with Rustin Times, to ensure content produced on the diversity of sexual orientation and gender expressions is done through active consultation with young LGBTQI Nigerians.

Roles and responsibilities

There are various approaches in defining roles and responsibilities that vary in depth, steps and focus of the team’s purpose. To name a few, roles could vary between project managers, financial managers, researchers, data scientists, health content area experts, technology digital health specialists and many more. Some of the roles can be covered by your own team and some by involving partners such as other local organisations or NGOs, monitoring and evaluation analysts and local and national governments including Ministry of Health and Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

To keep the focus on how to successfully run digital platforms, this chapter shares the learnings of RNW Media’s and global network partners’ experience on which roles and steps are needed for a “minimum viable team”.  In the following you will explore a simple overview of the steps you can take to assess the necessary roles and responsibilities in your team as a preparation for recruitment.

Which steps can I take to define the roles and responsibilities needed in my team?

1. The first step in setting up an effective team to run an impactful digital platform for social change is to identify talented young people who show a great interest in digital media and want to express themselves. You will also need to source content creators for user and professionally generated content on SRHR to ensure it is accessible and evidence based.
2. After that, you should make sure that the team you get together is inclusive and diverse.
3. The third step is to outline the team structure.
4. As a fourth step comes an assessment to check which role(s) are missing.

How did RNW Media define a minimum viable team in 2020?

Here’s a draft of an organisational chart that RNW Media has created in 2020 to give an overview of the different functions based on experiences with regional partners. This minimum viable team can function as a guideline of what skills are needed in an organisation to successfully manage a digital community.

Please be aware:

• Not all functionalities that are presented above mean a new position. It means the respective skills need to be present in the team. From RNW Media partners’ experience we have learned that sometimes one person has 3 functionalities.
• At least 2 members of a team (project coordinator, online editor and/or moderator) will need to have specific and extensive (contextual) SRHR expertise and knowledge.
• Gaps in the team can always be identified and recruited separately.

Below you can find several job descriptions that provide an example of the skills required for a number of these roles. Please keep in mind: these are examples. You might be focused on developing talented young people and not require 5 years of work experience.

What are other important digital skillsets and activities that are key to successfully manage a digital community?

Here’s a breakdown of skills for digitally driven teams to develop and execute a state-of-the-art content and SEO strategy.

SKILLSETS FOR DIGITALLY DRIVEN TEAMS

Content Creation

• Formats
  • Blogging
  • Vlogging
  • Podcasting
  • Interactive content (charts, graphs, etc.)
  • Games e.g., quizzes
• Visuals
  • Photography
  • Film/ video production
  • Motion Design Animation
  • Virtual reality / Augmented reality
• Tools & Web
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Adobe In-design
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Web development (HTML, CSS)
  • CMS (Drupal, WordPress)
  • SEO

Content Strategy

• Editorial strategy, experience strategy
  • Editorial strategy
  • Editorial planning
  • Audience analysis and targeting
  • User journey
  • Professional review (SRHR educational content)
  • Competitive analysis
• Structure design, process design
  • Editorial workflow
  • Content structure (categories, tags)
  • Writing style guide
  • Themes and topics selection
  • Workshops / training organisations

Keep in mind! Implementing content/SEO strategy is crucial. What’s important is that you need to make sure your team not only has the requisite digital skillset, but also the staff to implement it. It could be that the team you have been forming does not lack digital skills, but rather lacks digital strategy ownership. Therefore, it is advisable to have a dedicated digital specialist per team or project for developing and implementing the content/SEO strategy. 

To wrap up the minimum viable team structure and reflect on the section above, make sure to watch the video below: