xperience, and had grown with the ethos. They knew how to see the right contributors, seek full consent, get the best shots, all the practical procedural organisational issues and had the editorial know-how.
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RICHARD LACE
Country Director, Bangladesh
HOW THEORIES OF CHANGE HELP US DELIVER IMPACT
Theories of Change are at the very heart of how we work – our methodology. They are living documents, and the process must be inclusive and discrete for each activity and topic. For the production teams, it’s a process of refining ‘what it is that we’re doing’ i.e. how do our audiences think/feel? what’s stopping them from acting at the moment? what can help them? Theories of Change help you to ask, ‘are we still on track with the route we set out in the beginning?’ With Amrai Pari, the process was collective and involved 20 people over several weeks – going through the research and saying – what do we think? Is this going to work? What shall we change? By making the process inclusive with everyone involved complete with their different social/political backgrounds means it’s more likely the work will be focused and true to what’s going on.
The biggest driver of change was in the audience’s perception of risk – but we also needed to explain how they could make changes without having to wait for government to help them. This changed their thinking into a belief that they could work alone and not have to wait for government to tell them.
We arrived at three key themes for the production team to work with and to communicate to our audiences:
- The climate is changing, you can do something about it
- You don’t need expensive solutions and you don’t need government help
- You’ll be more effective if you do it collectively
We created a task framework for each series, with geographical areas and peoples we wanted to feature, and topics around the issues and produced a grid of these that we wanted to focus on. We included very simple, basic things you could do in half an hour as well as longer-term ideas, and another strand focused on how to make use of local government services e.g. your rights to have land elsewhere.
A fair amount of the talent that worked on this project came from previous programmes and had long experience with us. This investment in people over a long period of time has been really important as they had developed skills and talent, sufficient experience, and had grown with the ethos. They knew how to see the right contributors, seek full consent, get the best shots, all the practical procedural organisational issues and had the editorial know-how.