Get Your Message Across!

We believe that a clear vision helps you to reach your goals and communicate meaningfully with stakeholders: that's the idea behind "Get Your Message Across", a 4-days (travel days not included) interactive and experiential training course for NGO’s operating in the youth field that are interested in working on their communication skills. This course will work with creative methods to support participants in becoming more aware on how they communicate their identity, and to provide space and tools for them to develop partnerships with further stakeholders thus improving their own sustainability. In his TED TALK “The Clues to a Great Story”, the director and film-maker Andrew Stanton says: «The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, "Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story." And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is "Make me care". Please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. We all know what it's like to not care. You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. It's already halfway over, but something's caught you and you're drawn in and you care. And that's not by chance.» Nowadays the reality of a big number of NGOs operating in the youth field is a condition of isolation where organizations often struggle to provide their services, due to lack of energies, funds and, most of all, support and cooperation with their local communities, institutions or other stakeholders. What organizations often lack is actually just a clear vision of what their mission and beliefs are, and the ability to meaningfully share and communicate them and make the outer world care. Only when people can locate themselves inside a story they will truly belong and participate in its narrative, and that's exactly why we can’t really be in relationship with others if we don’t know where we stand ourselves. The main objectives of the training course are: - To raise awareness of the need of a clear vision and mission for NGO’s working in the youth field to develop a meaningful communication with different stakeholders; - To promote the importance of creativity as a fundamental communication skill by providing different creative tools and methods; - To improve entrepreneurial skills within the partnership building process by exploring what we can learn from good practises in the business field; - To encourage the establishment of cross-sectoral cooperations which can be supported by new quality activities implemented in the frame of the Erasmus+ Programme; Profile of participants: Our target groups are youth workers and youth leaders representing existing or establishing NGOs operating in the youth field. The participants are expected to: • Be able to communicate in English; • Be ready to challenge and engage themselves in a creative process; • Be curious to discover more about cross-sectoral cooperation possibilities; • Be ideally willing and committed to invest some time in working individually on their learning commitment also after the training course, out of the frame of the seminar; Methodology: Within this 4-days training course the participants will have chance to experience a diverse mix of creative and artistic methods, good practises from the business field, group work, discussions, field visits and exchange of experience. We believe that through these methods we can explore the topics of the course and connect it with reality and examples from other fields open for cooperation with NGO’s. Some of the key elements of the programme will be: • Movement and improvisation theater - as a tool for getting to know each other and yourself; • Storytelling - we’ll explore how storytelling can be used as a method to define and communicate your NGO’s mission and vision and „get your message across”; • Clowning - as a method to explore different aspects of communication. We see the clown as a particularly interesting character, as its language is based on setting a common goal and establishing an emotional connection together with its audience. We’ll offer a workshop on some clowning techniques as well as the opportunity to experiment interaction and communication with a real audience; • Insights from the business field - in order to communicate effectively, we need to know our partners well. During the training course we will compare communication strategies of the non-profit and for-profit sector, to learn each other’s language. • Field visits – we’ll offer to participants the chance to visit some of the good examples and cross-sectoral cooperation in Budapest as a way to inspire them for future actions back in their NGOs. The final part of the programme will be dedicated to explore how all these elements can help NGOs to foster cross-sectoral cooperation projects and especially how the new Erasmus+ programme could be used as a resource for that. The Team: Dorit Fauck, Germany Valters Melderis, Latvia Mafalda Morganti, Italy Réka Széplaki, Hungary