The Birthday of Guru Nanak Sahib, the founder of Sikhism, falls on full moon day of the month Kartik. This year on Monday November 14. That means a holiday in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and some other regions. So travelling from Delhi to Noida in UP by car was comfortable (less horns) and short (only 40 minutes). Arriving on Knowledge Boulevard we – Supriya and I – stepped into a complete deserted building…sorry, almost deserted. Because on the 8th floor of Tower B a team of Drishtee was waiting for us. They sacrificed their holiday because they wanted to attend our communication workshop. And they did! What an energy and eagerness to participate and to learn from each other. Hats off!
After some theory about why and how we communicate and the benefits of effective (internal) communication we worked on all the elements of a communication plan: why, who, what, how, by whom, when, budget and monitoring. Having a plan will help them to make choices and to focus. Three champions will now work on taking their communication plan further:
• on a corporate level, starting with the values
• for the Drishtee initiative DRAP: a social enterprise owned by rural women producers (hand-spinning, handloom weaving, manual stitching and handcrafted value addition plus livelihood generation for 5,000 rural women by 2020)
• and for Food Basket, an aggregator technology platform for producer companies. Food Basket aims to eliminate middlemen completely from the supply chain of food items and thus to facilitate direct connect between producer and consumer so farmers can increase their welfare.
It was an energetic day with a lot of fun working on the structure and the organization of communication. Looking forward to seeing all this resulting in three solid plans.
Nicolette Biessels
Communications expert
