Attachments
By Jo-Hannah Lavey
1 Introduction
Effective communication of critical lessons is essential to improve response to crises. This paper identifies what we know about how the sector communicates what it has learned to improve policy and practice.
Humanitarians produce a wealth of research and knowledge. There is, however, little evidence on how to best communicate this knowledge to maximise its impact. Despite the diversity and evolution of preferences for engaging with information, many humanitarian learning products are still published in digital PDF report format. This may not always be the best mode of communication – the World Bank found in 2014 that over 31% of their reports were never downloaded (Doemeland and Trevino, 2014).
In equal measure, humanitarian practitioners and policy makers require information that is immediately relevant to their work, in their context, at that moment in time. Communication is a two-way process. If the content of what is being communicated is not relevant or timely for the user, no approach to communications will make it so.
This scoping paper is aimed at producers and communicators of humanitarian knowledge. It provides a brief overview of core concepts and existing literature related to communicating humanitarian learning. It identifies five useful findings:
- Change is complex: it takes time and often does not succeed.
- Documented evidence is a small contributor to change.
- Humanitarians prefer tacit, networked knowledge over documentation.
- Humanitarians access knowledge that is immediately relevant.
- National actors are not sufficiently included.
The paper also outlines what the literature tells us about humanitarian preferences for how to communicate learning. It concludes by finding that those aiming to share documented learning to improve policy and practice are operating without a solid evidence base to guide them, and proposes a future research agenda to fill these evidence gaps.