IPC - Regional Buraux - PG/ PRNet meeting
From BDPWiki
Wednesday 12 November 2008
Contents |
Participants:
RBA: Barbara Barungi, Olivier Simah, Pablo Basz
RBAS: Pierre Hamouche
RBAP: Tanni Mukhopadhyay
RBEC: Parvis Fartash
RBLAC: Luis Lopes-Calva, Bhanu Shrestha
IPC: Francisco Filho, Roberto Astorino
PG/ PRNet: Uyanga Gankhuyag
Materials:
Presentation: www.undp-povertycentre.org/paper-seminar/NYNov08FranciscoIPC.ppt
IPC's Communications and Outreach Strategy: (to be added)
What was discussed:
Dissemination
- How do you disseminate? How does the target audience overlap with the actual audience? Can IPC disseminate UNDP publications through its channels (for example, the Africa Regional HDR)?
- The main dissemination method is the IPC Global Directory of Contacts with over 27,000 members in 189 countries. The directory of contacts was established by mobilizing UNV's online volunteers, interns and country offices. About 300 people per month subscribe on their own, by filling the online form on the IPC website. Anyone can join. We collect some details about members, such as their language preference, area of interest, location, etc. In the near future, we are planning to disseminate publications in a more targeted way, so that people interested only in gender, for example, only get gender-related publications.
- Hard copy publications are disseminated to UNDP country offices and regional centres. Because they are costly to print and to disseminate, we limit the number of hardcopy publications.
- IPC also creates a different version of online publications to help people with bad connectivity to download them easily.
- Other ways of dissemination are the World Bank Development Gateway; Eldis.
- HDRO also has a long history of dissemination through the Journal of Human Development. They have certain requirements; please contact HDRO for more information.
- In the Asia-Pacific Region, the Solutions Exchange, started in India, is now being expanded to the region. In total, there are 16 country offices who set up their national Solutions Exchange networks. The regional Solutions Exchange will focus on 2-3 cross-border themes, for example, gender & trafficking and corruption.
Demand for publications
- How do you assess the demand for publications?
- IPC has an elaborate metrics system, which allows to count the numbers of visits and downloads of documents. In addition, people also reply with feedback to various publications by e-mail, which IPC uses for monitoring demand. Based on this, one pagers and policy briefs have proved to be the most popular publication types.
- The Communications Office informed that UNDP's websites have a similar metric system, so people can add different UNDP websites to it. Please contact Yuan-Kwan Chan to find out more.
- Do you also track to what extent people open the publications sent by e-mail? This is possible, but more time-consuming.
Assessing quality
- IPC is going to launch a blog to allow people comment on one-pagers. The comments will be moderated (i.e. once a person posts a comment, it will be reviewed by the moderator and approved). Will these comments also be published in form of a one-pager?
- It is important to also assess the academic quality of publications. While commenting on articles via a blog gives some idea, more importantly, it should be measured by the number of academic citations of publications.
Country knowledge
- Most of UNDP's knowledge is in with programme/ project development. It is therefore, important to access this pool of knowledge which largely rests with project managers in country offices.
- IPC is working on a new project to highlight country initiatives on the IPC website (see "Linking Research Knowledge to Development Practice in the presentation). After some consultations (whether to keep it internal or on the external website), country offices agreed to keep it on the external website.
- In addition, IPC involves country offices in the workplanning. For example, we connect with country offices even before initiating publications to see whether they are useful. Country offices also help to find research institutions and organisations working in these areas.
Collaboration between IPC and PG
- How does IPC collaborate with the Poverty Group and the Poverty Reduction Network on communications matters?
- With the PRNet, so far the collaboration does not go beyond publicizing the IPC publications through our monthly News Updates. However, during this visit of the IPC team we will workout better collaboration and concrete ways to collaborate - both with the PRNet and on the Public Website.
- PG is revamping the Poverty Website, which will be up end of this year/ beginning of next year.
- The Communications Office also requested to share content for different language sections of the UNDP website.
