Communication is a risk management tool

By Sue Blaine, senior writer and editor at Flow Communications

If you’ve ever felt a jolt of annoyance when someone solved a problem for you without asking what you actually needed, you already understand community resistance. It’s a reasonable response to being handed an outcome you had no hand in shaping.

Consider what happened when e-tolling was imposed to fund the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project. The design and engineering was technically expert, and the gantries, cameras and billing platforms worked precisely as designed from the system’s December 2013 launch. But the system was formally scrapped in 2024, defeated by years of mass non-compliance, protest and litigation led by the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) and others.

‘The failure of the e-toll scheme was evident within months of its launch,’ said OUTA CEO, Wayne Duvenage. ‘Compliance levels peaked at around 40% during the first six months and then declined steadily thereafter. By mid-2014, it was clear that the scheme lacked public support and was not financially sustainable.’

In the years when the South African National Roads Agency was trying to get people to comply with e-tolling, it made a common mistake. It repeatedly presented a technically sound argument that all over the world the “user pays” principle is used to fund large public infrastructure projects. Gauteng’s residents were having none of it. The problem, among others, was that they felt that they had not been consulted before funding and other project decisions were made.

Communities don’t evaluate a project against its technical specification, they look at what a project means for them. They worry about dust, noise and commute disruption from an infrastructure project, or how they remember they felt when visiting researchers left, never to be heard from again, after asking them probing questions about their personal lives.

The costs of a consent failure are concrete and can be enormous: delays, litigation, security, redesign and as the e-tolls show, even abandonment. Set against those, the cost of consulting properly is negligible. 

Yet, often communication is viewed as part of marketing, something to be done once the project has been beautifully built, when actually, it is a risk management tool.

After the 2017-2022 National Strategic Plan for HIV, Tuberculosis (TB) and sexually transmitted diseases (STIs) drew criticism for being insufficiently consultative, the South African National AIDS Council (Sanac) set out to make sure the government’s 2023-2028 plan didn’t suffer the same fate. The award-winning campaign that followed included social media, radio, influencers, media relations and thought leadership, and used a number of the country’s official languages to reach tens of tens of millions of South Africans. 

Sanac brings representatives from all sectors of society, including health workers, scientists, civil society, government, development partners and ordinary South Africans together, to develop a collective response to HIV, TB and STIs in South Africa, making it one of the best-placed organisations to ensure proper consultation on the government’s national plans.

The campaign, which won a silver PRISM award from the Public Relations Institute of Southern Africa in 2023, was a large part of the reason the 2023-2028 national strategic plan was dubbed “the people’s plan”.

‘We drew up a communications strategy that put a coordinated mix of social media, radio, influencer partnerships, media relations and thought leadership to work to deliver this goal, in multiple official languages, and we are thrilled that we helped Sanac’s message reach tens of millions of South Africans and invite them into the conversation,’ says Flow Communications head of public relations, Caroline Smith.

South Africa’s National Research Foundation and Human Sciences Research Council are working on a multi-year research project into how young people in the Global South use their relationships to other people and the environment to promote their well-being. A fascinating aspect of this project – which is called u’Good?! and funded by the Swiss philanthropic organisation Fondation Botnar – is that it views it as foundational to involve the subjects of this research – young people – in the development and execution of what it examines.

‘By centring young people as collaborators rather than subjects, working across disciplines and across the South, and holding open the question of what well-being actually means in different contexts, the programme contributes to a realignment of theory, practice and politics towards a more just world for young people in the Global South,’ said one of the research leaders, Dr Angelique Wildschut.

The participatory research methods that the u’Good?! project is using recognise the complex nature of human behaviour and the limitations of qualitative research methods, which, while useful, cannot tell the full story. Research has shown that when people are encouraged to take part in developing social research programmes from the start, the result is more meaningful community engagement throughout the project. 

This is the part that tends to get lost when communication is filed under marketing. Consultation is not a sign-off you collect once the decisions are made. It is the process of giving people something real to influence, early enough that their input can still change how a project is planned. 

A community that has shaped a project has a stake in its success. A community presented with a finished project has only the option of accepting or resisting it, and opposition is very often the response, purely because a community feels that decisions are being imposed on them.

The practical implication is a scheduling one. Communication belongs in the project plan alongside the technical surveys and the legal due diligence, not in the launch budget at the end. It is a line item that reduces risk and it should be costed and timed as such.

Image credit: Sasun Bughdaryan / Unsplash