Building a network and identifying key relationships is an essential part of building a movement. But how do you go about identifying the relationships to build and what are the main challenges? Can groups like volunteers help you as you build your network and what are the three key things you need to know before you start to build or extend your network? Both of today's guests have extensive experience in these areas and share their top tips and suggestions as they talk to host, Halima Zaid. Chioma Ike, is the Executive Director of Circuit Pointe, an NGO focused on women and girls’ empowerment and rights in Nigeria. Zia ur Rehman is the founder of AwazCDS-Pakistan, a rights based approach organisation which has been helping to empower of marginalised communities across Pakistan since 1995. Listen in as they share their experience to help make your job easier.
The three key things you will learn from this podcast are:
Halima Zaid: On today's podcast we are talking about using networks and building key relationship. Our guests are Chioma Ike from Circuit Pointe Nigeria, and Zia-ur-Rehman from AwazCDS-Pakistan.
Chioma is a highly experienced change maker and women and girls advocate. She's the executive director of Circuit Pointe, an NGO focused on women and girls empowerment and rights movement in Nigeria.
Our second guests Zia founded AwazCDS-Pakistan in 1995 and has been central to the success of the Ujala Movement, which is centred around building support for sexual and reproductive health and rights in Pakistan. He's a well-known national and international development advocate in lobbyists.
So, both of my guests today, why do you think it is important to look beyond one's own organisation and build a network?
Zia ur Rehman: I think there are two most important reasons: One is that when you are talking about the issues which are quite sensitive, or so-called sensitive to the society. To me I think these issues are very, very important, but somehow the society feels that these issues are sensitive, particularly when we talk about sexual and reproductive health and rights of the people. This is one reason that I think we need more support, more alliances, more networks, more people from all sectors of our lives. This is important to build the networks. Second thing is that now, currently everywhere in the world we have seen that the civic spaces are shrinking. And while talking about the civic rights and considering the sensitivity of sexual and reproductive health and rights, they see it is always important to have a strong network base and we need to think beyond our own organisations, and we need to think beyond our own identities. The reason is that we need more support. We need more political and a social support from people from all sorts of life.
Chioma Ike: Ujala network is a non-financial support which every organisation must include as part of the strategy for sustainability. This means that by fostering relationships or building partnerships with individuals, with peer organisations, with donors or even the private sectors like corporates. You gain access to skills and expertise that otherwise may have been beyond your reach. I'll give you an instance, at Circuit Pointe, one of our strategies for growth is building a network and one way we have done that is to not only join coalitions of non-governmental organisations that have similar areas of work to us.
Chioma: We have also joint coalitions of non-governmental organisations that are also working in other areas, like we partner with an NGO that is working on HIV AIDS. It's not our focus area, but we know that working or building a network outside your own organisation creates opportunity for your organisation to grow or develop. It saves you cost, it supports successful project delivery and establishes a platform for your volunteers or your staff to learn and strengthen abilities to undertake specific activities. For instance, advocacy.
Halima: Thank you. You talked about staff and volunteers. Most of the time people don't always think about volunteers. When building a network, what role can volunteers play?
Chioma: The value of volunteers to non-governmental organisations is indisputable and they are capable of changing the dynamics of how you build your network. Think about the volunteers in your organisation or any organisation at all. You will realise that volunteers come from diverse backgrounds and different professional spheres. So, they have different circles of influence or networks which can contribute to your organisation's desire to build a network. Let's take a conservative number. If you have 10 volunteers reaching out to at least 10 people within their own network, that makes it a hundred people.
Chioma: Most organisations are small and just like us. Circuit Pointe is a smaller organisation and due to engagements in co-activities or day to day functions, you might not be able to reach out to build your network as regularly as you should, but volunteers play a vital role in keeping your cycle of communication open. You just need to orientate them. You just need to train them.
Halima: Chioma. I personally have been a volunteer and know volunteers volunteer for various reasons. Why is it important to understand what motivates, entertains volunteers in an organisation? Let's say for instance, supporting and working with the networks.
Chioma: I'm so happy that you've been a volunteer. I myself, I've been a volunteer for about eight years as well and volunteers are an important human resource, especially to small organisations with limited finances and staff. When I disclose volunteer management with other organisations, some of the feedback I receive is that their volunteers are less attached to their organisation and most of them leave after a short period of time just like you Halima.
Chioma: The reality is that not all volunteers give up their free time for a cause they believe in. This is why it's very important to understand what motivates them. I'll give you an instance, a young lady fresh out of college volunteers at an organisation. If her motivation is to develop a new skill and she feels she's not gaining the desired work experience, she's bound to leave after some time, or she becomes disconnected with the organisation. Now job rotation or shadowing could have been one way of keeping her motivated while her new skills and knowledge contributes towards your organisational goals. This is more complex than it sounds because every individual volunteer will have different motivations for working with your organisation. And it is imperative. It's so important that you discovered their ambitions so you can create win: win situations that results in volunteer loyalty. Their active participation, and volunteer retention. And in the end, you will naturally key into your organisation's vision and mission. So, the importance of understanding what motivates volunteers cannot be overemphasised.
Chioma: Thank you. Chioma you've talked about retention, you've talked about motivating volunteers. What kind of incentives do you think will motivate and retain volunteers to work in a coalition to work in a network to work in an organisation?
Chioma: I'll just share a few tips which have worked for us and which I think any other organisation can tailor to their context and motivate and retain their volunteers. So the very first thing you need to do is to understand your volunteers. Like we all said before, people volunteer for different reasons. So, we try to understand their motivations, and this becomes a key win-win because they're giving you your time and you're also giving back to them. One of the things we do at Circuit Pointe is that we are flexible, so we understand that our volunteers are very busy people, but they also give us their time, their energy, both offline and online. So we try to offer them working flexibility. We have some volunteers that walk in twice a week. We have others three times a week. We have those that just come in every day, we even have those that work remotely. So, we make it flexible so that they can fit their needs in as well and not just always wanting their attention and always wanting them to be working on our activities and our projects.
Chioma: Another thing we do is we share as much as we can, so we don't treat staff and volunteers differently. Actually, in the office you wouldn't know the staff from the volunteer. Everyone is treated equally. Everyone is called the staff, so this makes volunteers feel like part of the community. It makes them feel like we assign them serious functions. The specific types of roles. We encourage them to organise knowledge sharing sessions, so they are given the responsibility of handling a whole training or it helps their presentation skills, it helps their confidence and also gives them experience of handling key positions. One of the things we do is we give back by introducing them to opportunities for training that will help them improve their skills or their knowledge.
Chioma: They represents certain points at network meetings, at conferences and we also support them through their work study programmes and online education. And finally, which is most important to us, we appreciate their work. So we offer incentives to our volunteers such as transport allowance. We give them letters of recommendation, we give them references when necessary and you even offer them tea breaks some days in the office. So, these are some of the tips that have worked for us and I believe it will work for any small or medium organisation looking to motivate and retain volunteers.
Halima: Mr. Zia You've talked about relationships building and the importance of building a network. How did you go about identifying which relationships to build and what were the biggest challenges you encountered?
Zia: In Pakistan, the networking building and building relationship with civil society organisations was always a challenge because one of the most important things is that the civil society organisations do not trust the capabilities of the other civil society organisations. Every organisation thinks that they are able to do everything. So, we have countered all these thoughts of the civil society organisations. We have given spaces to the members of Ujala network. We have given them the ownership of the network. We have given them as much as required by them. We trusted them and that was why we are not facing that kind of challenge. We have been giving them the leadership. Like if I say that in the Ujala network, this is not Awaz that has been needing this Ujala network. There are six provincial and regional organisations have a very important status in Pakistan.
Zia: They are leading Ujala network in their own provinces and regions and we have 46 district partner organisations which have been leading this network at the district level. So I think when you give leadership to the others, they gave ownership to you and ownership to the network and ownership to the course. And that's why I think we are not having that much of a problem in our networks. Most of the time the challenges of ownership, the civil society organisation leadership thinks that if they are not given the leadership space and if they are not given financial spaces then the problem occurs. But we have actually encountered both of these problems from the very beginning of the start of this Alliance.
Halima: Out of the relationships you've built, which are the most important to helping you work and why?
Zia: Since we have relationship with various sectors, if I may say that we have a partnership with the national SDG task forces from across the country, which is the task force on the SDGs, or Sustainable Development Goals, but the SDGs three, four, five, 10 and 16 which talk about the issues related to sexual and reproductive health and rights of the people. So that is one kind of alliance that we have with the parliamentarians who are part of the national SDG task force in all the four provinces and in two regions of Kashmir and in Baluchistan. So this relationship requires different type of requirements. Means that they need more time, they need more support, they need technical inputs that we always provide to them. They need support in writing questions for them that they usually ask at the floor of the house [parliament].
Zia: And then the second kind of relationship is with the civil society organisations, and we are actually supporting the grassroots level community-based organisations. So that is more of, again, a technical nature and financial nature [of help] that we have been providing to them. We have a very good relationship with those organisations. We now openly discuss with them the budgets available. We have given them the powers to use the budget as per their own organisational tender operating procedures. But keeping in view the financial requirement of our donor AmplifyChange. This is very important.
Zia: The third kind of relationship is with the media organisations. Their requirements are different, sometimes they don't want us to have a very formal relationship. So, we have an informal relationship with these media organisations, and they have been actually projecting [promoting] our organisation as well as the programme objectives. And we have been reaching millions of people through these media voices. So, the relationship types are different, and the challenges are different, but still we have been actually very positively and very successfully dealing with all of them.
Halima: I would like to refer back to the first discussion we had on building networks. You're talked about involving volunteers and creating relationships, could either of your organisations have done what you did without building that network and relationships?
Zia: I think this would not have been possible. I believe that we have been actually building successes upon each other's progress and programmes. One of our partner organisation’s is running a campaign for transgender rights. Whereas our programme, also has one component that talks particularly on the rights of the transgender community, this is helping us develop each other's capabilities, like leveraging each other's programmes and capabilities. So this, I think, is very important. There may be some challenges, like sometimes they contribute the resources from one programme to another programme. But particularly in our network and alliance, we have given them this space that we can even use the resources together. So, we can have more better results and forceful voices with the government agencies and with the grassroots level people to build better results and build desensitisation properly.
Chioma: To be honest, we would not be where we are today. Non-governmental organisations in general are networks in their operations or in our operations which means a number of relationships must be built beyond the organisation. Whether you are carrying out projects in communities, whether you have grants from a donor, whether you are part of the coalition. Without relationships we would actually be nowhere. We have so many success stories in our projects because of the relationships that were built over the project period. We have also tried to maintain those relationships because of what we noticed or what has happened is that most of the time those relationships we have built actually turn out to be a results for us.
Chioma: I'll give you an instance. One of our projects was carried out in 2017 and we built a relationship with key influencers and some community contact persons. In 2018 we decided to scale up the activity in neighbouring communities. The relationship with one of the communities was proving difficult. The traditional ruler of that community, an existing relationship that we had, actually spoke to the person we've been trying to reach to say ‘I know this organisation, we’ve together and I’m satisfied with their will’ - that actually give us the endorsement that enabled us to gain the community trust and enabled us to build partnership with this new community, forge an alliance with their key influencers and we have a project today in that community because of an existing relationship.
Halima: Out of the relationships you’ve built, which were the most important to helping you work and why?
Chioma: Relationships have so many levels and first I would say cooperative relationships we have built with existing structures and communities such as women associations, girls associations, one of which is called Amwada in Evo land [Nigeria].
Chioma: Even the men and youth associations, they have been instrumental to the success of our work. I would consider them most important to helping our work; because we've always identified the CBOs [community-based organisations] as key influencers because of structures in the community and because of the role they play in the community. And these community-based organisations they've also created sustainability for our work at the grassroots by mainstreaming our action plans in their structures. And, they have also turn into engaged advocates, which makes them almost powerful allies in building other relationships. So especially where we have activities in the communities, we have found them to be key mobilisers, leveraging their network to help the bigger network. They have been instrumental to several social norm changes. We have been campaigning for communities and even when we leave, they are the ones we hand over the battle to basically, and we still maintain relationships and they give us community reports on what is happening.
Chioma: So, for us, they are the number of the priority relationships that we always try to maintain because of how important they are to our work. Another relationship that I would also mention, it's a complementary relationship we've built with other nongovernmental organisations because of the training and the technical assistance we always receive through consultancy. Like I said, Circuit Pointe is a small organisation, so we have limited finance, we have limited staff. One way we address our staff issues is motivating and retaining volunteers. One way we address our limited finance is building complimentary relationships. I call it complimentary because it's a symbiotic relationship where resources that combined work skills and competencies are combined and where it's a win-win for both organisations. So, you not only impact our projects delivery positively but strengthen our organisation's capacity. So I would say those two relationships have been key to helping us carry out our work.
Halima: Did you experience any challenges while establishing those relationships?
Chioma: Well, yes. Who wouldn't? Where you're building a relationship it always has its ups and downs. So, for us, our biggest challenge was the image of a competitive relationship as against a complimentary relationship. So, when you're part of a coalition of nongovernmental organisations, which could be about maybe 15 to 20 organisations all working together to achieve a certain goal. We expected a complimentary relationship because we are all similar in ways, but what we noticed was cases of negative competition for resources, hardly enough information, lack of transparency. And for us this was an unintended outcome. However, we strategized. We went from building a group relationship with NGOs to building relationships with peer NGOs.
Chioma: Our initial strategy was to become part of coalitions and [thought] all our problems will be solved. So, when we noticed that that wasn't working for us, we re-strategised and started building individual relationship with peer organisations, but still within same coalition. And what that did for us was that we saw it turn around. We were able to exchange knowledge these NGOs and we were able to support each other to accelerate change in the communities where we're working.
Halima: For those who want to start building a network Chioma, or expand the one they have. What are some of the tips you'll suggest?
Chioma: Well, it's never too late to start building a network and is always important to leverage your existing network to create a bigger one. So, whether an organisation is interested in online or offline networking or even both, the three steps I would suggest you take are:
First, you need to create a database of contacts, a database of contacts is the very first step. We call it the repo or the repository. It's just a simple like cell with about six headings: name, designation, phone number, email, organisation, events and key contacts. So every time a member of your team meets someone new, maybe at a workshop, at a training, at a conference during a project activity or even donors the database is updated. Now this database is necessary for two reasons; first, it forms your foundation for building a network and secondly, it ensures relationship continuity, even if the key contact person leaves the organisation.
Chioma: After creating a database of contacts. The next step an organisation should take is to enhance their organisation's visibility. So, you need to stay visible by constantly connecting with contacts in your database. This can be through sharing activity updates on social media, on newsletters, it could even be brochures. For us at Circuit Pointe, we achieve this through SMS blasts. Ensuring you stay visible gives insight of what you're currently doing. Even if you're not handling any project, you can write on issues that align with your organisation's mission, or you can write about a needs assessment, or you can even show interest in what others are doing by retweeting tweets, or retweeting tweets that resonates with your organisation’s work. It still gives them insights on which direction your organisation is going, which makes them powerful allies in building relationships.
Chioma: After you have created your database, after you've enhanced your NGO's visibility, the last step you should take is to always have an ‘elevator’ pitch. This simply means represent your organisation confidently. You don't want to have the attention of about a hundred contacts from your database. You have a communication channel that allows you to connect with them on a personal level and you don't know what to say. An elevator pitch is a brief description of your organisation or your project in a way that sparks the listener's interest. So, you need to make sure that your organisation’s network is built by staff, by volunteers or board members who have good communication and interpersonal skills. Someone who is passionate and at the same time is confident to speak about the work that your organisation does. If an organisation is able to successfully take these steps, which we have taken and have worked for us. I believe that they should be able to either start building a network or expand the ones that they already have.
Halima: That was great. Drawing lessons from the Ujala movement, for those who want to start building a network or expand the one they have, what three key steps would you suggest they take?
Zia: I think one of the first ever things is we should give leadership to the others. We need to trust the capacities of the other civil society organisations; also, give them spaces both technically and financially. This is very, very important. And, the third most important thing to me is to keep things open. The more open the network, the more you will have better results. Because if you don't have that much of an open management of the network and you don't have open communication with your members and organisations, I think there would be a trust deficit and a trust deficit is the most dangerous thing.
Halima: I'm sure with the information you've been able to provide, most of our grantees will be able to learn and ensure that they strengthen their network. We've come to the end of our podcast. Thank you Chioma and Zia for speaking with us today. You've been great guests for us.
Chioma: Hello everyone. My name is Chioma Ike and I'm the executive director at Circuit Pointe. Are you looking for how to motivate your volunteers? Take a look at my how who guide titled 'How to motivate and retain volunteers'. You can find it on www.amplifychangelearn.org.
Zia: Hi everybody. I am Zia. I represent Awaz Centre for Development Services that works on sexual and reproductive health rights movement building in Pakistan. You can find out more about how to engage multiple stakeholders to strengthen in your movement by checking out my 'how to guide' on the subject, you will find it on www.amplifychangelearn.org.