Media Consumption of International Development in United Nations Missions

The Communications arm of a UN agency asked the Capstone team to analyze how sources of public information, media and social media, affect policy makers in making decisions about foreign aid priorities.

The Capstone team interviewed high ranking UN Mission diplomats, UN press and communication officers to determine what news and information sources they were reading/watching/following. Their second methodology consisted of an extensive literature review on media’s impact on investment decisions toward development.

Beyond customary forms of media covering international development topics, such as op-eds and editorials, the team paid particular emphasis to the relevance and impact of social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instragram, etc.) on policy decisions. Collectively, knowledge drawn from the literature review and data from interviews was synthesized to produce recommendations to improve UN’s media impact on policy makers.

After completing 18 interviews with officials from top ranking donor countries, the Capstone team found that representatives to the UN are consuming news more than five times a day. The majority read the news that is “fed” to them, by both “office” feeds, like internal office memos and emails, as well as through “social” feeds, like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter.  Officials associated with the UN are passively receiving the news rather than actively searching for it.

Based on these trends, team recommended the following:

Audience: The Capstone team recommends the UN agency defines its audience to appropriately tailor their content and outreach strategy. Based on the team’s observation, the current Twitter feed shows the audience is diverse, from concerned citizens to government advocacy groups and think tanks.  The tone of the posts varies from light-hearted and emotive to serious and factual.

Content: Media content should be focused around the habits and preferences of the target audience. In this case, UN representatives consume informative and factual news about development topics.

Communications: The communications and outreach strategy should also be tailored to UN Mission representatives. Based on the habits and preferences of respondents, the team recommended creating a separate Twitter account for factual, short, informative posts on development topics. This contrasts with tweeting for the general public that offers more emotional content and focuses more on storytelling.