1. Strategic Communications
Nick Birnback, Chief
Public Affairs, DPKO-DFS

2. Summary What is strategic communications?
What does strategic communications mean for the mission?
Who matters?
Why does it matter?
What are the risks and possible failure?

3. What is strategic communications?
Communications activities guided by overarching plan
Key audiences identified
Desired outcomes agreed
Master narrative agreed
Messaging channels selected
Products aligned for consistent messaging
Constant evaluation with data to adjust strategy

4. What does it mean for the mission?
Builds support
Establishes identity
Dispels misconceptions
Facilitates mandate implementation
Protects UN personnel
Provides enhanced situational awareness

5. Who matters?

6. Why does it matter? Prevents spoilers
Keeps UN Peacekeeping relevant in 24-hour newscycle
Engages key audiences
Enhances UN Peacekeeping’s image
Timely responses to negative press and emerging issues
Harmonizes messages across communications platforms

7. Why does it matter, really?
Damage to the mission and UN Peacekeeping
Undermines confidence in our supporters, emboldens detractors
Reduces operation effectiveness
Security implications
Strategic communications are an operational requirement

8. How do we do it? Move from this…

9. To this.
“Young readers are moving away from browsing…expect news to come to them on social, through alerts and through personalization”. (New York Times 2014 Innovation Report)
Estimated number of active social media users is 2.03 billion
Social networking accounts for 28 percent of all media time spent online
16 per cent of people rely on Twitter or Facebook for their morning news
1.23 billion users log into Facebook an average of 17 minutes each day
5 million images are uploaded daily on Instagram
More than 500 million tweets are sent out per day by users
Source: Go-Globe.com, 26 December 2014