engleski

BUILDING MEDIA RELATIONS CAPACITIES of CS ORGANISATIONS

The first and most important strategic pillar in the strategy of improving relations between civil society organisations and media is capacity building of professionals engaged in communication and media relations function. Capacity building should focus on a number of skills and competencies needed in that function and apply a holistic, integrated approach and critical thinking principles. CSO communicators need to know everything that business communicators know but an additional developmental and sustainability perspective needs to be integrated in capacity building in order to ensure their positioning towards media and other stakeholders in line with the mandate and mission of civil society organisation. A number of strategic inputs and activities along the lines of this strategic direction is to be considered in the context of needs of a particular organisation or set of organisations as an outcome of basic education needs assessments. Along the lines of the second strategy pillar focusing on advocacy and awareness raising a dialogical and relational communication model needs to be implemented with an additional quality elaborated in the Building Belief model. Application of this model increases trust in a CSO not only among general publics but also among media and makes them more willing to consider closer collaboration with the civil society organisations in implementing what mutual goals in enhancing democracy and citizens rights. This strategy requires needs assessment particularly regarding the choice of competencies, knowledge and skills to be addressed in order to enable activists and other professionals in CSOs to fulfil the role of communication professional. Ensuring media advocacy which is using media for advocacy purposes and also launching communication process, particularly through the new media that recruits new advocates of a CSO and particularly of its missions and goals, is a set of strategic tasks that requires specific targeted capacity building, primarily within CSOs. The size of an organisation and its mission and resources will be the main factor in choosing the depth of these strategic inputs and interventions not only in the media relations but also in programme orientation of CSOs. The third strategic pillar focuses on effective communication to ensure quality relationships that include collaboration and possible partnerships. Implementation of these strategic directions implies various steps in partnership elaboration which would realistically be long term goal but is also particularly realised as networking within civil society sector and in public media, awareness raising, public debates within sectors and capacity building of CSOs. As the second pillar, the strategic pillar 3 also feeds into the main strategy orientation on capacity building.

media ; strategy ; civil society organisations

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