EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Evidence to Action for Strengthened Family Planning and Reproductive Health Services for Women and Girls (E2A) is USAID’s global flagship project for strengthening quality family planning and reproductive health service delivery. The project will end in 2019, and during its last two years, E2A wants to ensure that its legacy will live on through the global family planning community. Databoom synthesized seven years of complex work into four legacy themes and created a communication strategy to fortify the project’s posterity.
SERVICES
- Design Thinking
- Qualitative Research and Analysis
- Participatory Workshop
- Strategic Communications
- Team and Stakeholder Engagement
Capturing and Communicating
a legacy
Evidence to Action for Strengthened Family Planning and Reproductive Health Services for Women and Girls (E2A) is USAID’s global flagship project for strengthening quality family planning and reproductive health service delivery. The project was launched in 2011 and continues through 2019.
During its final two years, E2A wanted to institutionalize its key approaches in the global family planning community to ensure that its work would live on. E2A needed to move from a current state where staff led implementation to a future where stakeholders would champion the project’s approaches and resources. E2A also aspired to be recognized as a thought leader through its sustained influence after the project’s end.
“That’s where we came in.”
Databoom partnered with Thinking Hound, an agency that specializes in knowledge management and communications. We identified E2A’s legacy themes and developed a communication strategy to ensure that the project’s key approaches would live on. We started by understanding senior leadership’s vision for the project’s legacy. Then we reviewed E2A’s evidence and conducted interviews with internal and external stakeholders in family planning and youth. We conducted a workshop with senior staff to synthesize seven years of complex work into four legacy themes, 1) scaling up; 2) youth contraceptive choice; 3) first-time parents; and 4) strengthening service delivery.
A key insight was that people, not only products, would carry on E2A’s legacy. The strategy would, therefore, need to identify influential “gateways” who would amplify E2A’s legacy and reach a wider audience of stakeholders to help institutionalize its approach and resources. We captured the strategy in this framework.
We then created a plan for each legacy theme that included key messages, gateways, audiences, actions, resources, and channels. This example below is for the first-time parents (FTPs) theme.
IMPACT
We worked with senior leadership and the communications team to incorporate the plans into their annual work plan and publications calendar. Doing so ensured that legacy themes would guide E2A’s outreach and communications in the remaining project years. The framework and the plans received positive praise from senior leadership and communications staff. E2A has used the plan to guide engagement with gateways and key audiences.
