Skills Boost: Useful communications strategies for LGBTI groups: Take it to the next level

At this session, Simona Mursec from Ljubljana Pride (Slovenia) shared the experience of developing several separate communications strategies for different areas of work and updating them. 

We covered:

• Does an organisation need more than one comms strategy, and what to do if the answer is yes? 
• How did Ljubljana Pride approach this challenge, and what did they learn? 
• Why update a comms strategy and how to do it in a smart way? 

Here are our top 9 quotes from this session check them out and see if the recording of the session might be a good match for you! 

1. A communications strategy gives us a ready-made answer to requests like “please put this on social media”

“A comms strategy gives us the strategic framework for what we share, which channel is appropriate to share information from other organisations, and how we enhance our own audiences by cooperation with other organisations”.

2. Beware of Consultants bringing their own processes, especially private-sector consultants who mostly work in very different contexts

“I involve people that can support the processes. I am not a big fan of consultants when the role of the consultant is to come in with a model, a theory or their own way of doing things. Because most of the time it will not work for us. We have to develop our own model, approach, thought, commitment, and ownership of it.

I am more of a fan of people who can facilitate a process, who can take time to understand organisational needs rather than coming in with their own way of doing communications. For consultants it can be rather a game, and for us it’s not. This is our life.”

3. Everything comes with experience

“It took us a long time until we were able to invest into an organisational strategy. Once we had the organisational strategy, everything else went much faster, it was much clearer why we needed it, and how we could work with it.  We built the muscle for it, then it was easier and less resource-intensive or time-intensive”.

4. Primary and Strategic audiences for Ljubljana Pride

“Our primary target audiences are LGBTI+ young people (15-29), the LGBT+ community in Slovenia, allies of LGBT+ community in Slovenia, allies and LGBT+ activists from abroad and young activists. And our strategic audiences are Slovenian media, LGBT+ influencers, LGBT+ organisations and initiatives and other activists’ organisations and groups.”

5. Sustainable funding is still one of the biggest challenges

“One of the most important resources for an organisation are trained staff members and volunteers. And by trained, I mean people with enough political, content, personal and other kinds of capacities. It takes money to attract, support and train, to build the capacity of your team. ILGA-Europe’s communications grant was the first grant ever we could use to pay comms staff. Most of the time it is a puzzle”.  

6. Don’t make your cycles fit funding – decide strategy and then get creative to find funding to fit.

“I never connect organisational development and strategic development to funding. For me, funding is a tool. We decide at our own pace what our work is going to be. We decide what we are going to do, what are our strategic priorities and how we are going to do it, and then we find funding for that”.  

7. Strategic choices do not always work in real life          

“We spent some time trying to figure out how to use TikTok best. On the one hand, it is a great tool, and we got good outreach and a lot of visibility among young people, which is our target audience. But it also creates a lot of hate. So theoretically we would like to have it as a two-way communications channel. However, it is managed by volunteers and by young people themselves, and we don’t have the capacity to support them enough. So, for many years we have had to keep the comments closed. Strategically it should not be this way. But practically, it is the way it is.”

8. I would love everybody to have a printout on the wall

“I would love everybody who is doing content work to have a printed document on the wall, and once a week to have a glimpse to think how to incorporate our objectives into the work next week. But life doesn’t work like that, and people don’t work like that. So, we review strategies periodically, every three months. And if you do it this way, you can still clean up and make sure that nothing is forgotten. If you do it once a year, you probably have a problem”.

9. We often don’t have a choice to communicate or not – so we should structure it 

“You might be an organisation that works more with internal audiences. You might not be as publicly politically exposed, but you almost certainly still need to communicate. We cannot escape it, we can still be dragged into because of the very hostile environment. So, we prefer to invest and to be more strategic and structured, so we know how to capitalise on it, how to respond, and how to build public pressure”.

You might like to check out some of our other communications resources: 

• Useful communications for LGBTI activists: (Skills Boost recording): Click here
• Communications Strategies for Small Organisations (The ILGA-Europe Hub): Click here
• 9 Steps to a Good Communications Plan (The ILGA-Europe Hub): Click here

Do you struggle with some specific communications challenge, and do not know where to start? Reach out to us, we might be able to help! Contact svetlana@ilga-europe.org