 which will talk about communication for social change and transformation. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome our session chair for the panel, Mishraya Krishnan from NVT to join me on screen who will introduce you to our stellar panelists as well as steer this very interesting conversation which is about communication for social change and transformation. If you have any questions, then do send it to us in the chat and comment box. You can also join our online conversation using the hashtag IPRCCC2020 which is IPRCCC2020. Do share your key insights that you've taken away from these sessions. So ladies and gentlemen, I'll get ready for this invigorating session coming forward for you while we bring our panelists and session chair on screen. Tell us in the comment box which has been your favorite session of the day. Let's call it that. Yeah, which was the session that steered, you know, your thinking cap on, got you to put your thinking cap on, got you to think about your strategies or rethink on those strategies and tell us which have been your favorite highlights of the session so far. And as we all know, we will be showcasing the award ceremony this evening, the IPRCCA which is Indian PR and Corporate Communication Awards 2020 which were held in its physical format last evening, keeping all safety precautions in mind. We will be broadcasting it tonight for all of you for the wider audience here. We hope for all of you to join us and celebrate the win of this industry. So in this session, which is communication for social change and transformation, on our panel we have Mr. Anurag Chauhan, Nandita Chibar, Vansh Nathani, Lakshmi Agarwal and Renuka Dudeja. So if our panelists are here, can we please bring them on screen? So firstly a very warm welcome to all of you. And... Thank you. Thank you. So apologies, I think Shreya is having a little bit of trouble enjoying it. So until she joins in, let me be the proxy here and ask your one-two questions to all of you. So when we talk about this topic, communication for social change and transformation, what are the first key points that come to your head? Do anybody who's aspiring to get into this domain? So Anurag, if you'd like to start. Well, first of all, I'd like to congratulate E4M for organizing this current Dr. Bhattra for organizing this beautiful event. Well, yes, there are a lot of things that are in my mind when we talk of communication. Well, we were just talking a while ago with my friends and we were discussing as to how communication and the tools have really helped us during this lockdown as an NGO. I run this organization called Humans for Humanity. And we were struggling to reach out to people in the remote areas. Now, all of us are privileged. We're talking on a laptop, we have a mobile, but in the rural areas where people do not have the tools of communication, it's very difficult to reach to them. But somehow, thanks to our team, we were able to reach to all of them and we managed to organize workshops and we managed to organize sessions for women training them about menstrual hygiene and we made sanitary napkins with these women. So it has played a very important role for us as an NGO. Apart from that, there are lots of other people on the panel who would be able to tell us about their expertise, especially Renuka, who I know personally, one who's an educationist. And Renuka also could tell us a little bit about the CSR and then I could give my point as to why, as an organization, I have a lot of complaints as an NGO from corporate or from corporate houses, I should say. Not from you, Renuka, don't take it personally. I'm sorry. Sure, I'm Iraq. But well said, I think Bangon completely. Welcome, Shreya. I can see you're online now. Hi, guys, hi, everybody. Sorry for the short, but here I am. Lovely. So like Anurag, you asked, coming from where I come from with a lot of corporate background and CSR you mentioned, for every corporate being socially responsible is like a big agenda to drive. Not only to attract customers, but genuinely do make a change and difference to the world around us. And I always say this, if I look at all human in sort of skill sets, one of the most important life skill sets, I feel that one must have is communication. The ability to say what you want to say to the world out there and get and understand what you're saying. You know, I have two daughters and both of them study psychology. And one thing I hear them offer saying often is, you have to feel to heal. And I bring it to the point of the conversation where we are. For me, social change is a big and huge healing process. It's a constant healing, constant change. And for that, communication I think plays a huge role to evoke the feelings inside of people that they want to make a change. They want to make a difference. People like to be in gangs. You see bikers hanging out together. You see people hang out with, they say birds of the flock, feather flock together. It's like that. Communication hence, you know, bond people into a flock. And for any social change, I think you need a flock and you need to enhance and you need to make it bigger and bigger and bigger. So I think from where I come from, communication I think is the most important thing. So wonderful. So Shreya, I was playing your proxy. So I leave the bait into you to take the conversation forward. Thank you so much. Thank you. As always, doing a phenomenal job. All right, so I'm going to now, Reenu ka thank you, take off from where you just left off and I'm going to bring one shame and get him to give us some sort of insight into what the role of communication is going to be in a mass and a larger spectrum as an education is one shall ask you to weigh in here and give us a little bit of an insight into what that means for you and how it plays out. Absolutely. Thank you. Good evening to everyone. I'm really happy to be here. So from any education perspective, I think we've also adapted very swiftly and I think we had to do the most adapting in this lockdown. I know a lot of people would feel that way but education was a place where everything was so physical that whether it's the teaching community or the students and the parents also very important stakeholders, they were very detached from technology as such and so very easy forms of communication. So what we had to do was to get onto platforms like Instagram to be able to engage our audience which is grade eight to 12 primarily and to be able to while they're sitting at home come up with something that sells them this dream. So what we did initially was we came up with something called the Mindless Scholarship Fund in which we told the students that while they're sitting in the comfort of your home and it's been a difficult year not only for you but for your parents especially financially why don't you build your profile through a few online courses, do a few things and apply for these free scholarships. It was equally difficult to communicate with the universities to get them to engage with the students and to offer those scholarships. But again, the gap was that the universities had no way of flying down to schools to engage with the students. So I think all of this really came well together and the lockdown has been a great learning experience. I will of course talk about other things also but I think none of this is left. Yes, I'm going to ask Nandhita to come in here and talk about once you left off at a point which was very poignant because he talks about gaps that often need addressing and how media and communications can play a role there. So Nandhita, I'll ask you to welcome your thoughts on this context. Hi, Shia. Hi, Uwad. Social change and transformation is a slow process. It takes years, decades, centuries, sometimes to get gender equality, such a slow process. But only once in a lifetime or once in many years we have these watershed moments like a pandemic that can trigger social change, really change, transformation so quickly that we are struggling how to cope with it. The fact is that communication has now played a massive, massive role. Imagine when in a lockdown, it is the communicators, it is through communication tools, platforms and strategies, through media that we were able to get these messages out. Something like a pandemic has triggered not just social change, behavior change. It has also led to technology change, a trigger, a technology trigger. It has also led to trigger and policy change because if you look at right now, the healthcare budget is 137% up. It has reflected, this pandemic has shown the gaps in health and in hygiene. Let me give you the example for the longest, longest time public health experts have been speaking that hand-washing is the most cost-effective public health intervention. And it would be teaching the 22nd hand-washing in schools and in the communities. And the pandemic hits and everybody, there are videos on TikTok and there are videos everywhere, everybody is teaching. And then suddenly you realize the gaps in infrastructure. You don't have stations, and what about water? So I would think that this pandemic is, I would take it as a silver lining in the crisis. And it is a huge opportunity for media and communication, especially communicators to basically take, go full throttle and go forward with their advocacy and awareness in a plethora of subjects. Right. Anurag, I'll bring you back in here to sort of talk about, now the gaps from the other side, what do you think are the lacunae and what do you think are those areas that need focus in terms of building capable, robust communication processes when it comes to the side of social impact and socially impacting organizations that are not essentially built for profit. Hence their structures don't really plan in such a manner. But what has the last year taught you in the economy? Well, Shreya, what has happened as Nandita Renuka was just talking about how people have this power today of the social media. See, there is a difficulty in people to communicate in front of others. Maybe they're not very comfortable talking publicly, but today having platforms such as Facebook, TikTok or any other social media, Instagram for that matter, people have that power to communicate and reach out to each other, telling whatever they want to, and they have done that. But we've also seen that how it has affected the community or affected the generations or the generation that we live in. I mean, you see TikTok, it was drastic. I mean, the way I used to see the TikTok videos, of course, there was some good content on TikTok as well. But at the same time, the kind of content on TikTok, I mean, it was absurd. On the other end, there were a lot of people at the same time who were making good use of it. There were people who were making good use of Instagram, Facebook, and all the other platforms. Now, giving one of our examples, what we did was during this lockdown, when a lot of people were facing issues in earning money, there was a community we worked with called the Katputli community in Delhi. This community is one of the oldest and one of the biggest street artist community in the world. And this community, as it is, did not have any scope of earning money because they are coming from a background where no one wants to watch a Katputli performance anymore. Now, how we transformed that entire thing into a project was called the Katputli project. And we went to schools. We went to schools and said that your online classes are going on at this point of time, which might become mundane and boring for students to attend at the same time. It is something new for them. So why not maybe bring something which is different? So what we did was we took stories, the Hindi stories of the course material, from the course material of these schools and gave it to these Katputli valas. And through the medium of the tools of the communication, we were able to reach out to schools, Katputli valas were actually taking the classes for these students and showing them the stories by the help of their Katputli. So, I mean, what I'm trying to say that this project was thought, I won for volunteers that thought of this project. Now, this is such a beautiful way of using media and communication to reach out to the students to benefit the communities and its impact. So these people who were struggling to even get food in the middle of the pandemic, had enough money to sustain for the entire year after this project started. So that is one thing. The other thing that I'd like to point is corporates and NGOs. So because I come from a sector, which is the NGO sector, we all, I mean, living in the urban cities, we all talk about things around us. But at the same time, and this is also the case for the corporates. There are many corporates who are doing a lot of projects. They're spending a lot of money. But what I end up asking them is, that is it reaching the people? I mean, a lot of communication happens on the media, be it newspapers, be it, you know, the projects that the corporates are running online. The point is that when we talk about awareness, does the awareness actually reach the grassroots level? It does not. When people came out, a lot of films have come out. So people were talking and appreciating films like Padman and films like Toilet Ek Premkatha. Of course, I appreciate it. I appreciate that such kind of movies are coming. They're communicating to the audiences. But at the end of the day, who are the people watching the films? People like you and me. People who are living in the urban cities. People who have access to theaters and people who have money to go and watch the movie. People who are on the ground level who actually need to know this information and not getting this information because one, they do not care who Akshay Kumar is. They do not care what film is going on. They do not have enough money. He earns 100 rupees a day. He or she, they earn 100 rupees a day or even less or even more sometimes. But they do not want to go and watch a film. The awareness level in that community in the grassroots level has to reach through people like you and me or the organization. So when NGOs, when corporates are coming out with information, they need to make sure one, the information is absolutely correct and it is reaching to the grassroots level where it should reach. Because I'm assuming that people like you and me are aware about many things that we should be aware about. So I think the awareness point of view, the communication really needs to reach the bottom line of the society to be able to upgrade it or to be able to help these communities. Absolutely, I think there is a lot of merit in that and also what a lot of times organizations end up doing in context of CSR is they usually find things that they can see, touch and feel, which is very close to them. But the real grassroots reality is very drastically different from your urban settings. But having said that, Renuka, I'm going to ask you to step in here and talk about as we previously spoke off how communications need not essentially be only meant for and tailored to social change, but how all communications can be conscious of ensuring that there is impact and change in everything that organizations say and do. So you can weigh in on that and tell us a little bit about the campaigns that you ran. Sure, sure. So, in all these years, it's a private joke. All of us at marketing and communication, we call ourselves storytellers. We are the ones who create the story and a good story is what sells and this is which people buy your products or services or whatever it is that you are selling to them. But a good story needs insights from people first. It's not one-way communication. First, you have to take in from people. What is it that our target audiences want to hear? While we do all that storytelling piece, very focused from a corporate point of view to sell our value proposition to our customers, at the same time, many, and so many times in our lives, we reach a crossroad where we realize as corporates that there is a huge responsibility to educate, take a little bit of a thought leader stance and educate people on the go. And I'd like to maybe explain it via an example with my most recent job assignment with Antara Senior Living. As a head of marketing and communication, when seven years ago, when we started, you know, our whole marketing and communication campaigns, a, the whole baggage of old age home and the Indian mindset of feeling very guilty to save for your retirement, normally Indians cut down as they are aging. So in the line of that sort of behavior of our target audiences, it was really tough to break through to our customers. And we realize that in the process, we need to educate people how a good quality life. So we chose very consciously a brand language, whereby we took social media, we took face to face, all kinds of traditional, non-traditional, ATL, BTL, mediums to educate people on independent senior living, active aging. So the words that you choose, you help change mindsets. People who were against the thought of, oh, we can't put our parents in an old age home. It's not an old age home. It's a fun retirement community. So to be able to show all this, communication played a big, huge role, right? So we choose sometimes to educate our customers on the way as we go along promoting our brands. And also we learn from them and educate ourselves. What are we missing here, you know? And we realize that when we started doing research, so many seniors, there is so much abuse against seniors. There is so much that could have been done. So we used our existing customers who are well-read, well-traveled to help sort of sow the seeds of wellness into some new generation target audiences who then contribute to those seniors who are not so well off, who can't take care of themselves, whose kids for different reasons are not taking care of themselves. So it kind of amalgamates into a social, yet a bigger, larger cause, you know? The stigma has grown. So infusing communication and social impact change together somehow leads to these kind of results. So one shall bring you in here and I'll quickly ask you to share a couple more examples of what you've done in the last year that you've seen where you've married social impact and change with communications and actually have seen results that have positively impacted for social good. Actually, so I think the first step, of course, is to create the right offering for the time. So one of the co-work that we do in educes is teaching students how to communicate better. So for that, the route that they typically prefer in debating trainings or model United Nations training is a very popular activity in the student community. So we were actually able to take that online, which was otherwise a barrier because they thought you can only learn this in person through activities. But we had good trainers and what also happened with that is we had flexibility of time. So we could create a cohort of 10 students, as well as of 100 because of the channel of communication and the quality delivered was equal. So at the same time, no flight costs, no hotel costs, no travel costs, and it made it more accessible. So that was very exciting for us. Simultaneously with that, on the mind, we have a big challenge that we're solving in this country, which is the lack of career guidance. I don't think people are thinking of career guidance. They're thinking of doctors and CA's and engineers and they're not always lucrative careers. They're wonderfully lucrative careers with humanities. So to be able to do that, we thought let's start at the top. And we have something called the International Certified Career Coach. It's an American certification or not only educators, we even have people from Google and other MNCs that come and do this. And what we did with this was that we took it online or created a digital platform and as opposed to certifying typically 100 counselors a month. During this pandemic, we've already done about 14 and a half thousand. Now what's happened with that is that is where on the ground there has been a change in impact. And I do take a few of these calls post the session and they've been from rural places in South India, from Sikkim, from places. Otherwise we couldn't have access because we used to go to the eight biggest cities in India. So things like this, and it was all about everything was done online. Like if you want more applications, you increase the online spend. It's just entirely reliant on how well you communicate the medium of communication that you choose and most importantly, clarity. And I think we've all seen, there's been a huge, huge increase in the time we're all spending on our phones, maybe just wasting time on Instagram. But that's where these ads are also coming in with good things and good courses that are eventually helping. Right, thanks Vansh. Nandita, Vansh spoke about and also Anurag and in some form Renuka. All of them spoke about various mechanisms of ensuring that the medium and the message are cracked well and then you take the final communications out there into the spaces that you want to. I'm gonna ask you to tell us a little bit about measurement and how do you actually see through this entire mechanism because a lot of times people are really still understanding platforms. Everything's not as hunky dory if you're working with limited resources. So how do you then plan, manage and also sort of track your success in context of communications for social impact? I'd like to start with an example on this. When it comes to planning and everything, I think if they want to throw social change and transformation, in terms of media, we have to explore our regular regional media a lot. And what happens is that if we are sitting in metros, we are in our own little bubble, it is the mainstream media that we start focusing on and we are not, you know, acting in a lot of regional and vernacular media. But to take that message to the last mile, you know, to the vernacular media, regional media is extremely essential. The example that I was giving you that during COVID when there was absolute lockdown and messaging on hygiene and how to prevent had to be, you know, sent across again to the most vulnerable and to the last mile. It is through voice and video and, you know, an adaptable format that you could take it through rural India, right? If you have audio, can you play it in a loud speaker? You know, if you have video, can it run on very low bandwidth because, you know, in terms of connectivity? So, and then if you're talking about measurement, when you talk about measurement, we have to start using technology, I think. There are a lot of apps which a lot of non-profits, a lot of organizations are using to monitor what is the messaging, how much, you know, people are taking it in, what is the response like. And even in media, but I would still say that, I would still say that I think measurement is something that all of us have not cracked. We do have large numbers of digital engagement of a free text number of people, but I still am not very sure that, you know, how credible they are. So that is my opinion. Right. Now I'm going to wind this up with a quick rapid fire. I didn't warn you about this before, but I'll start with Anurag and I'll come all the way around. Anurag, I'm going to quickly ask you to name three things that organizations can do quickly, which is social impact related to communication. I didn't get it. Three things that social impact organizations can do to have better communication. While communicating the right thing, the right, right information, because the law, I mean, can I explain also? Can I also say? No, just three words each. I think Cathy is back to remind us that the clock is ticking, so. Communicate the right thing, reach out to the right community, reach out to the bottom line of the community and make substantial use of the social media. Right. Renuka, tell us three things that organizations can do to ensure that even what they normally communicate can have some form of social change or impact. Authenticity in the communication, mean it. Close the loop, listen to your customer. Last time, just keep doing it. Vansh, what do you do with students and student communities? So three things that you can do to ensure that the future is in safe hands when it comes to the way things are communicated. Well, we don't want our communication lost, so we have those crazy, catchy taglines and creatives that are very important. Along with that, you have to target the right audience and we time it well considering that there are very peculiar timings in the education space that you need to get right to be able to actually get them engaged. Awesome. And Nandita, lastly, but not leastly, coming to you, can you tell us the three things that media can do to improve and ensure communications are actually getting access on both sides of the spectrum, both audiences and the people that want to stand out these people. I think firstly, media needs to have the right information, there's so much of disinformation also going down there. Secondly, I think it needs to be more creative as well, in terms of storytelling, more relatable. And thirdly, media needs to be more empathetic. And not just, I would say, when only an event happens, there are certain issues which are there always, but the media tries to highlight them only when there's, if you talk about water, there's a drought, oh my God, we have a drought, we forget about it. There are floods, we forget about it, climate change, oh, it's too hot. So it's more sustainable information on things that matter and keep going on it and spend and have those journalists give them that space to do those stories. There are so many stories that journalists just don't get the space to do it. Media doesn't carry it. So media needs to talk about that, definitely. Thank you so much. There you go. Karate, back to you. Those were little snippets that I wanted to round up with. Thank you so much. Thank you everybody. Thank you for being a wonderful panel. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I love you.