Mobilizing Voices and Capital for UNSDG Goals

Brief Introduction of Client
Our client, a non-profit organization, created a social platform to mobilize and post initiatives and commitments. The platform particularly aims to bring more financial institutions, corporates, and many other entities, to help them promote their initiatives relevant to achieving UNSDG-related goals and mobilizing capital for such actions. Our client initially requested Columbia SIPA students to facilitate mass engagement of new audiences for the platform. Previously, [this platform] has been facilitating broadcasting of Jane Goodall on the NASDAQ screen making her commitment as a force for good, and also successfully convened a number of influential figures in the finance world to be committed to this initiative.

Project and Progress
The first 3 weeks of the project period already taught our team and all the members of our class much about effective client engagement and communication. We learned that finding mutual time availability with the executive-level may be challenging, and as a team, we must be wise, timely, and proactive to secure a solid relationship between us and the client. Fortunately, our team was able to secure our first client Kick-off meeting, scheduled for this Thursday. 

Since our first kick-off meeting was delayed, our team wanted to make the most out of the time before the kick-off meeting. Our team reached out to our client and asked for initial background documents, which opened a door to understanding how this platform was created and under which intention. However, the contents of the document stay at a high level, hence we are expected to deep-dive into understanding what our client is envisioning with the platform.

During our initial assessment of the platform, we identified several rooms for improvement. First of all, the platform needs more content to attract a broad spectrum of audiences. The platform does not have any articles or interactive functions, limiting itself from getting more visitors and users. Related to this issue is that the platform needs more clear direction on what kind of sub-initiatives or programs it will try to mobilize. Our team’s initial thoughts are, for instance, bringing social media influencers to the platform to post content, and making interactive events within
and outside the platform (an ‘offline’ event could be launched to promote UNSDG goals and the importance of mobilizing more capital). As a background work, we are currently researching on innovative ways to draw more attention to the platform by benchmarking other successful sustainability-related social media Influencers.

Conclusion and reflections
Sustainability communication is perhaps one of the most important elements for a successful uplift of public awareness and engagement with respect to sustainability goals. We are living in an era where younger generations are particularly keen on using selected social media platforms such as Tik Tok and Instagram, and the communication strategy in the private sector has already adapted to this transition.

However, the public sector is generally lagging behind, and we need a tremendous effort in the next few years to bring transition to this. As a policy school student, who worked in non-communication-related strategic development for the past few years, these new means of conveying our message truly resonated with me and made me want to deep-dive thinking about how we can effectively capture the younger generation and also beyond the younger generation’s mind. Our team is very excited to learn during our upcoming first kick-off client meeting to hear from our client, what options we can potentially come up with, to lubricate and facilitate this platform’s function to play a critical role in mobilizing voices and capital for UNSDG goals.