Learning By Doing: Building Communications Capacity Across Language, Cultures, and Causes with Fondation CHANEL
The Challenge
Fondation CHANEL has a bold vision for “women and girls to be able to shape their own destiny.” They pursue that vision by supporting an impressively diverse range of grantee partners around the world and across a variety of issues.
How do you build a workshop series that helps organizations build capacity to communicate and make change with focuses ranging from climate change, to human trafficking, to workforce training, with grantee partners working in multiple countries, cultures, and languages, and participants ranging from executive directors to communications coordinators?
Heartwired Insights and Strategy
Wonder’s answer to this question was rooted in two things: First, the belief and experience that the Heartwired approach to messaging and persuasion is universal because it is rooted in an understanding of how all humans make sense of the world and decisions on issues. Second, that despite its universality, it is not enough to simply introduce people to Heartwired—success lies in creating space and opportunity for people to apply what they’re learning to their own work.
For our work with Fondation CHANEL, that approach manifests in custom curricula molded to reflect the breadth of the grantee partners and their work. It includes ample opportunity to apply the Heartwired approach in the workshop setting, and direct 1:1 coaching for each participating organization so that they can truly map the Heartwired approach onto their work.
Supporting participants across multiple languages in a virtual setting also requires robust language justice efforts, including live simultaneous interpretation for workshops and coaching sessions, as well as workshop materials (slide decks, work sheets, etc) available in the language in which they feel most comfortable learning and participating.
Wonder’s approach to capacity strengthening is also informed by cognitive apprenticeship: a learning approach that prioritizes teachers making their often unseen thinking and approach visible to learners, and creating opportunities for learners to apply and practice what they are learning with support from teachers. One critical way Wonder workshops achieve this is by creating robust opportunities for time working and sharing with peers through small group activities and discussions within the workshops themselves, which participants have lifted up as particularly helpful for their learning.
Results
Since 2018, Wonder has offered a range of workshops, both series and one-time offerings, on a host of topics all rooted in the Heartwired approach, including Social Change Communications, Fundraising, Public Speaking, and Neutralization and Persuasion. Participants have consistently given the workshops and coaching sessions strong ratings and high praise across the many groups that have participated. Further, the ongoing nature of our partnership with Fondation CHANEL has allowed Wonder to incorporate feedback from participants into future workshops, too.
Here’s what some participants have had to say about Wonder’s workshops:
“Thank you all for this methodology. It was very helpful for us. And I’m very surprised because in about 20 minutes we now have a full script for our strategy to reach out to our former donors. This is something that we’ve been working on for a long time so this was very helpful. We will definitely apply the Heartwired factors in other communications.”
“The MOST accessible/ language-justice oriented virtual event I’ve ever been a part of!”
“This is one of the most accessible multilingual, online training/communities I have been a part of. Great job! Gives me tons of ideas for what is possible and necessary re: language accessibility.”
“I appreciate our ability to work in different forms, as a whole, in smaller groups and then on our own. It really nurtured the different ways of learning and allowed us to connect with others and share ideas. My coaching sessions: chef’s kiss. Another layer of getting engaged and further grasping this work and how to implement and apply it to my own work.”
“Getting direct feedback on our written materials has been enormously helpful! My coworker and I have really benefited from having that direct 1:1 time with our coach, and we’re applying what we’ve learned directly to our EOY campaign.”
“Having the space to practice and explore the materials deeper with 1:1 feedback from our coach was super helpful. I really felt like I could engage with the material and concepts more deeply and work through the sticky parts of applying the framework to our work.”
To learn more about Wonder’s approach to capacity strengthening or building a workshop series for your organization, contact the Wonder team at curiosity@wonderforgood.com.
You can learn more about Fondation CHANEL here.