Making a difference: Strategic communications to end violence against women. A toolkit from the UNIFEM Strategic Communications Workshop Series.

The purpose of this toolkit is to share the learnings of the workshop series with womens organizations working to end violence against women around the world. Recognizing that advocacy cannot be effective without a solid communications strategy and acknowledging the power of communications in showcasing and magnifying the effects of innovative work this kit is intended to support advocates for ending violence against women. It can be used to train others in their organizations and networks to plan more strategic and intentional advocacy campaigns and to harness the power of communications to raise awareness lobby stakeholders or push for the adoption of new laws. The toolkit offers practical advice stories and lessons learned by women and men all over the world working to end violence against women as well as overviews of communications processes. The first chapter explores ways of matching media and messages including creating and pre-testing materials; the second chapter covers monitoring and working with the mass media; the third chapter provides project planning tools including a template to help guide communications planning; and the fourth chapter provides sample communications strategies created during the workshops. Each of the chapters in this toolkit begins with a story and a glossary of terms used in that section. The chapters contain as appropriate the following elements: tip sheets overviews additional stories and lessons shared during the workshop series in a section entitled from the workshop participants. (excerpt)