Note:

This is the audio version of an online event, in which a couple of the speakers refer to visual elements. If you’d like to see the websites, etc, that they mention, please see the video of the event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvJVCgBprwY.

Details:

Across the world, there are many websites and apps that help citizens to better understand how their democracies work, and what their elected representatives are doing on their behalf.

Historically, one of the main ways these tools could measure their impact was by tracking their visitor numbers and page views via website analytics tools.

However, across the world, civic and pro-democracy tech projects are finding that citizens can’t, or no longer, directly visit their websites and apps. They’re either restricted by data packages that only allow them to use social media sites, or are finding out information via AI chatbots or social media, rather than directly visiting sites and apps.

This shift can make it harder than ever to measure the reach and impact of pro-democracy projects and tools. Traditional website analytics no longer tell the full story, leaving some projects struggling to demonstrate their effectiveness—and, as a result, to secure the funding needed to sustain vital democratic services.

At this TICTeC gathering, we hear directly from practitioners running civic and pro-democracy tech initiatives from across the world. They share the strategies they’re using to reach people where they are, ensure their services remain accessible and relevant, and find new ways to track impact in this changing digital landscape.

Ana Arevadze from ForSet in Georgia talks about their work with social media influencers to inform and educate Georgian youth on voting and democratic information.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh from Enough is Enough Nigeria shares how they have leveraged social media, chatbots, and messaging services through their ShineYourEye platform to provide citizens with accurate democratic information and improve access to elected representatives.

Joseph Tahinduka from ParliamentWatch Uganda speaks about working with infomediaries such as local radio and journalists to get parliamentary information to a wider audience, as well as their usage of social media and messaging apps.

More information

This is a TICTEC Communities of Practice session. Find out more about TICTeC at https://tictec.mysociety.org/.

Sign up for TICTeC updates at https://tictec.mysociety.org/events/ or subscribe to updates about all mySoicety activities by telling us what you’re interested in at http://eepurl.com/gOEVFj.

Transcript

Alex Parsons 0:01
Hi everyone. I’m Alex Parsons.

Alex Parsons 0:02
I’m the Democracy Lead and senior researcher at mySociety. Thank you for joining us here for this TICTeC community gathering.

Alex Parsons 0:08
So as a reminder, TICTeC stands for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, but since 2020 we’ve been also running year-round activities between conferences to connect people: building, using and researching tech to strengthen democracy and civic power so we can learn from each other and boost our impact.

Alex Parsons 0:25
The topic of today’s gathering is how civic and pro-democracy tech projects can reach their intended audiences and track impact in the current digital landscape.

Alex Parsons 0:34
So at mySociety, we run websites that help people follow what’s happening in Parliament, submit information requests and report issues in their communities. Many people use these tools, and we rely on website analytics to demonstrate the impact to funders and sustain our work.

Alex Parsons 0:54
But the ways people access democratic information and information in general is changing all the time. In some places, people are getting more information directly from AI chatbots such as Chat GPT, rather than visiting websites and apps directly, with news web organisations already reporting decreases in traffic. In others, people are restricted by data packages that only allow them to use social media sites rather than browse the web freely.

Alex Parsons 1:09
So one of the questions we have is, how do other civic tech projects around the world cope with these kind of obstacles and reach their intended audiences, and how they track and demonstrate their impact?

Alex Parsons 1:21
To answer these questions, we’re joined by three fantastic speakers. We have Ana Arevadze from ForSet in Georgia, Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh from Enough Is Enough Nigeria, and Joseph Tahinduka from the Center for Policy Analysis, who run the ParliamentWatch in Uganda.

Alex Parsons 1:36
The first presentation comes from speaker Ana Arevadze from ForSet in Georgia, who will be talking about their work with social media influencers to inform and educate Georgian youth on voting and democratic information. Over to you, Ana.

Ana Arevadze 1:47
Thank you so much. I’m Ana Arevadze. I’m from the organisation ForSet and also DataVis Tblisi. Today I’ll talk about how we designed and ran one of the Georgia’s largest online pro democracy campaigns focused on Gen Z and what we learned about reaching audiences in the practice.

Ana Arevadze 2:06
These were our final campaign results: in a 4 million population country, by the end of the campaign, after 145 videos with 17 content creators, we’ve had around 9 million views, half a million likes, and I will explore other key metrics in the later on in the presentation.

Ana Arevadze 2:28
Everything actually started two years ago when we had the first Russian law introduced in our country, and Gen Z took to the streets and protested it, and their activism really helped to stop the first implementation.

Ana Arevadze 2:45
Many of them hadn’t even probably voted yet, but their pro-democracy and pro-Western values were clear, and this showed us that if we wanted to defend democracy, we need to speak with this generation and not at them.

Ana Arevadze 3:01
But actually, as many of you know, civil society often struggles here. Our language is too complex, too institutional, and doesn’t connect with the young generation.

Ana Arevadze 3:11
And that’s why we decided to experiment with the campaign using influencers as trusted messengers. So we kicked off with the preparation phase for the campaign, which lasted around one year.

Ana Arevadze 3:26
The preparation actually lasted for a longer time than the campaign itself. The campaign lasted approximately three months.

Ana Arevadze 3:35
And for the whole campaign, the idea was that everything we did in the campaign should have been based on research, and we wanted to come up from the preferences of our target audience. And the idea also was that we wanted to educate influencers around elections and have long-term engagement even beyond the elections.

Ana Arevadze 3:59
And another crucial component was to monitor the campaign in life itself, of not just finishing it, wrapping up and looking at the metrics and then writing reports like we usually do in these projects.

Ana Arevadze 4:13
And we wanted to have outcomes from it, so we could fail during the campaign and we could learn from it. And because it was a really, really experimental campaign, like all campaigns are, especially with the influencers.

Ana Arevadze 4:29
So why influencers? Because we now realised that we wanted to talk to our target audience, with the most trustworthy messengers for the young generation. We did research and consultancy for several months and realised that there were at least two options and strategies with recruitment of the influencers.

Ana Arevadze 4:50
The first option usually is to work with those influencers who already talk about politics, activism, election disinformation, or are partnered with those organisations who already talk about these issues.

Ana Arevadze 5:05
In this option, the good thing is that you empower those people who also are engaged with the same cause as you, but you also kind of keep reaching the same audience that is already reached.

Ana Arevadze 5:21
In the second option, you actually break your bubble, break your circle, and it does sound great, but it is kind of difficult to reach a new audience.

Ana Arevadze 5:32
It is difficult for you to work with a skincare influencer who has never put on a video on politics or elections, and suddenly they start talking about it. It’s weird for the creator, it’s weird for their audience, and it’s not very natural for them.

Ana Arevadze 5:49
But if this option is done right, it could be the most impactful way to do this.

Ana Arevadze 5:57
We also realised that there are three strategies in terms of curating the campaign.

Ana Arevadze 6:03
The first option is to have so called script-based campaign, where basically you define what the influencer will talk about. You will write scripts and the influencer will read it in their videos.

Ana Arevadze 6:17
But this kind of falls into the category where you speak with your own language to the audience. You just have different messengers to do this, and it’s not very effective to reach new audiences.

Ana Arevadze 6:30
The second option that is done worldwide is to give influencers the total creative freedom, and you will achieve the best results here, because you will have the most organic content.

Ana Arevadze 6:45
But when the campaign is done by civil society, and we usually have donors, we usually have some kind of restrictions the total freedom might have some kind of safety issues as well.

Ana Arevadze 6:58
And the third option is a bit more balanced option, where you give creators total creative freedom, but also intervene from time to time, by giving them tips, by giving them mentorship consultancy.

Ana Arevadze 7:10
And this is the best option if you want to have, like more organic content, but also work in some kind of frames.

Ana Arevadze 7:21
Also I have here the market that you can collaborate with. It can be a micro-influencer, mid size influencer, and also, like a huge influencer.

Ana Arevadze 7:32
When a content creator has maybe only 10k followers, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will not reach a certain audience. They could potentially have, like, some kind of niche audiences, and you still can reach your target goals.

Ana Arevadze 7:50
First, of course, we wanted to learn about our audience. It’s not like we woke up one day and had some money from the donors, and wanted to make content videos and do the campaigns. Of course, first we need to learn about our target audience.

Ana Arevadze 8:11
We did the desk research, where we identified the platforms that young voters use. It was mostly TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.

Ana Arevadze 8:23
And also we did focus groups where we identified with Gen Z, where we asked, if an influencer talked about elections, would you listen? What kind of information would you want to hear from them?

Ana Arevadze 8:38
And after this, we identified 65 possible influencers, and from those, we chose 17 who not only had their audiences, but also shared the same values, so that collaboration would be smooth.

Ana Arevadze 8:56
We also partnered with election experts, because while ForSet, our organisation, is strong in storytelling, data visualisations, we’re not election experts, specialists, and they actually helped us to develop key strategic messages such as: why every vote matters, how to register to vote, why vote bribery is harmful, and what to do if your rights are violated on the election day and etc, etc.

Ana Arevadze 9:27
We also divided the campaign phases. The first was a test campaign. It lasted around one month, and we tried the different formats, different tones, different messaging and many videos failed during this process, but it taught us what worked, and we did really learn our lessons.

Ana Arevadze 9:50
Second was an informative phase, which lasted six weeks, and influencers explained more about information, about elections and how voting worked, and all the thematic things.

Ana Arevadze 10:04
And the third phase was the actions and trend phase, the final phase that lasted around 10 days, and we pushed more trends and challenges, the sounds memes, and really wanted to create the urgency and FOMO, the fear of missing out, that other people would join and make more videos around elections and spread more information.

Ana Arevadze 10:32
We also set KPIs, and this really helped us to then identify all the people that we actually reached. The first metric that we aimed for was engagement rate. It is a portion of likes, comments, shares and saves on the on the general views of the video.

Ana Arevadze 10:57
So a lot of times when we hear about campaigns, people say that we’ve reached 1 million people. Reaches are not very reliable source of measuring the campaign, because if I have a video on my news feed, it already counts as a reach. But did I watch it? But did I click on it? Did I like it? Did I engage with it?

Ana Arevadze 11:22
That is what the engagement rate actually shows. So usually marketing agencies, they aim for a more than 4% engagement rate. But in the end of our campaign, we had an 8% engagement rate, which was a big success for us because it was democracy oriented campaign and not a marketing campaign.

Ana Arevadze 11:42
Of course, we can never reach 100% of our target audience, not all of them use Instagram, TikTok, not all of them are following our creators.

Ana Arevadze 11:54
But if you can reach 40% or 50% of your target audience, then there is this thing called word of mouth, and you can spread information that way.

Ana Arevadze 12:06
Another metric that we used is user generated content. So let’s say you see a video, you will like it. That’s great. You will comment it on it. That’s also huge engagement. But if your video inspires other person to make the same kind of video or with their own spin, it is user generated content, and it is a huge impact that you can do in such kind of campaigns.

Ana Arevadze 12:42
So I there were, like lot of questions in terms of how to do these trends and how to have your videos go viral, and our approach was to just gather creators in the same room and give influencers total freedom.

Ana Arevadze 13:01
We should try to think less of us, and we should give space to the creators who are actually experts in this area, and who basically earn money in their incomes, in breaking algorithms.

Ana Arevadze 13:14
So that was our approach, and in we basically just facilitated the process and just helped them during this process.

Ana Arevadze 13:23
I will show you some kind of examples of what kind of videos so you can create. This is mainly in TikTok You can just create a game in the app, and some people will use it.

Ana Arevadze 13:37
In this case, we have a game about elections. It’s in Georgian here, but lot of people used it, and it went viral because our creators, at first started and using it.

Ana Arevadze 13:48
You can also make a quiz or ranking. And here is like, what kind of person you are when going to elections. It’s not a proper translation, but it was like, kind of this thing that they were ranking and making videos, and it really reached a lot of people.

Ana Arevadze 14:05
You can also create your own sound, or your own creator can make a sound and plus action. In this case, we had “Get ready with me to go vote” or to go to elections. So this really also went viral.

Ana Arevadze 14:23
But in some cases, you can not count all the user generated content that is created on the internet, because TikTok is so huge that some of some of the people can not use your sound, but still do your trends.

Ana Arevadze 14:42
So it kind of sometimes gets out of hand. It really reaches huge amount of people.

Ana Arevadze 14:49
So I already mentioned that it is very important to monitor your campaign in live so you can make mistakes during the campaign. We collected the. data, and we retrieved the analytics from the content creators after two weeks.

Ana Arevadze 15:06
Well, they published the videos, and it really helped us to compare numbers, analyse the sentiments in the comments, analyse, answer some kind of questions and to be prepared in the future videos.

Ana Arevadze 15:19
So it’s also best to monitor everything in life. These are all the metrics and all the data that we collected from the influencers, and then just based on these, we analysed everything.

Ana Arevadze 15:35
And I will just know, don’t go very deep into these numbers, but I think this is the most crucial and important part when you do such kind of campaigns, of what kind of lessons you’ve learned during this process, and we’ve learned that it is very good to do less micromanaging and give more independence to the creators and to the influencers, because they know their job the best.

Ana Arevadze 16:01
And also it is very important to have more risk assessments, because influencers can receive a lot of hate speech reports, hate comments, and it is really important for you to check this in a daily basis.

Ana Arevadze 16:19
And if your resources are limited, it’s also always better to recruit influencers who do not talk about your issues so you can reach the new audiences.

Ana Arevadze 16:29
And it is very important to experiment in these kind of cases, because experimenting will lead you where you want to be, so you will make more and more videos.

Ana Arevadze 16:45
And lastly, pro-democracy projects reach their audiences, not by just shouting louder, but just speaking in the right voice and through the right messengers and platforms that people actually use, and our expertise shows that if you just give young people the tools and they will not just listen, they will just create and spread their own messaging. Thank you very much.

Alex Parsons 17:16
Thanks a lot Ana, that’s really, really interesting. So with that, let’s pass on to our second presentation. So over to Ufuoma from Enough is Enough Nigeria.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 17:28
All right. Thank you so much. All right, so I’m just going to be speaking very quickly to what we do with our Shine Your Eye platform, and I’m going to be sharing my screen.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 17:39
While I’m not sharing a presentation, I am… this is what the platform looks like. So Shine Your Eye is a web platform, and what it really does is to help citizens find the elected officials that represent them across all tiers of government and connect with them.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 17:57
And so this tool was created by EIE Nigeria really to connect citizens with their elected representatives.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 18:08
Because we have a situation here in Nigeria where you have, after doing elections, you know, you see your your public officials, they do the campaigns, and you get to engage with them.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 18:20
But then after elections, you there is that vacuum where you don’t know how to reach out to your representative, you don’t know where to where to pass your complaints to and what to do. And so that’s why we created this platform.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 18:31
This platform basically houses the email addresses, date of birth, phone numbers were available of every elected official in Nigeria that is going from your local government up until your federal government, that’s at the National Assembly level.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 18:51
And what we’ve used, what we’ve used this tool to do, many times, is to help citizens do this. So how do citizens use this? They use this by when they go on the platform, like I’m doing now, you come here and you see find your representative, and so you can enter a name, location or your polling unit number.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 19:10
I’m going to speak more on the polling unit number in a bit. So for example, I am from, let me say I’m from Delta State. And so I click in Delta State in the search box, and what it does is that it brings out all the results of all the data that we have from that particular state.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 19:30
And so once I click on it, it takes me to a page that shows me all the information that I need from Delta State.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 19:38
So I get to see who my governor is, my governor is Mr. Sheriff Oborevwori, right? And so there’s an explanation here as well.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 19:49
So first of all, you see the map that shows you where the Delta State is. And then it explains to you that your governor is who you popularly elected as your chief executive officer is the state manager, and is responsible for implementing state laws and overseeing the operations of the state executive branch.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 20:05
Basically, what this does is that when a citizen who doesn’t know who they elected, who doesn’t know their governor or their representative is, they come on here, and they also get to see what the person is supposed to do, at least a snapshot of what the person is supposed to do.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 20:22
And then, when you click on your governor, you’re able to see his picture so you can recognise him. Then we also have, like, his date of birth, his state, his party email address for you to be able to send information to him or inquiries as well.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 20:39
And then, because earlier this year, you know, one of the things that we tried, we focused on doing, is really talking to our target audience well enough.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 20:49
So at EIE, we are an organisation that targets the youth population of in Nigeria. So that’s people within the ages of 18 to 35 and where are these people?

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 21:00
Many of the times they’re on social media and the Gen Z’s also fall under a large bracket of the people that we’re speaking to – Gen Zs, and then Millennials as well.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 21:09
And so it was important for us to include the social media handles of elected representatives on this platform as well as part of our database, because many of the times when there are issues or people want to engage with their elected representative, it’s very easy for me to, you know, ask the person on X or Instagram and then pass my message across.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 21:30
And so, one of the things that we also do is we crowdsource the information that we have on this page so there is so it’s not just an organisation feeding you with information, but we’re actively working with our target audience to also ensure that our information is verified.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 21:48
So for example, when we’re working on the database for Delta State, we had a content creator on TikTok who reached out, who reached out to us, and then we engaged him, and he was able to give us the information of the local government chairman in Delta State, and then their pictures are still being uploaded on the website.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:10
So as you can see, we have all their information, their names, who especially because there was a local government election that happened earlier in the year, and so it was important for people to now know who they had elected into that level, because local government in Nigeria is the closest level of government to the people.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:28
And so here, while we don’t have the picture of this chairman, you can see that we know that he’s a male. We know his party, we have his phone number, and we also have his Facebook.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:38
And when you click on it,. it also takes you, it’s also supposed to take you to his account so that you can engage.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:47
So how have we used this in our campaigns? So one of the campaigns that we’re trying to run, is a ‘know your rep’ campaign, which we’ve actually done a couple of times before, whereby we leverage the information on our Shine Your Eye platform to drive a campaign where citizens can then engage with their representative.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 23:09
So it’s a hashtag called #knowyourrep. And so we do this across social media platforms, especially X, where like, people, X is a very active political social media platform, especially in Nigeria, and so we use this to drive engagement to our Shine Your Eye platform.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 23:26
And in the last two election cycles, I think we’ve seen over about 15,000 unique views on the Shine Your Eye platform.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 23:34
Now moving on from the Shine Your Eye platform to the Office of the Citizen chatbots. This chat bot is linked to the SYE platform, and it’s housed on WhatsApp.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 23:47
And what this does, is it makes it easier for people to be able to engage with the the information that we have on the web platform.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 23:55
And so as you go on WhatsApp, and you click and you send a message to the designated chatbot number and then you can engage with it.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 24:02
This was very handy in the last election cycle in Nigeria, where people were able to look for their polling units.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 24:09
So we had a delineation process that happened in the country, where polling units were reshuffled, polling units were changed, and people didn’t really know where it’s where they could go to to vote.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 24:20
And so what did we do? We have a PU locator platform, which is also a web platform. When you go in there and you put in your polling unit number, and it could take you to your polling unit as well.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 24:33
And then on the chatbot, you do the same thing, and you get all the information of your representative, of everybody you’re voting for in that election cycle and in the coming months.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 24:48
What we are trying to do with that platform is to make that platform really a one stop hub where every Nigerian youth can go on to the chatbot and send a text message.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 24:57
Hello. Chat, hello. I want to know who…what my local government budget allocation is, and they’re able to also get that information handy for engaging with their elected officials. And that’s really what we do with the Shine Your Eye platform.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 25:11
And in terms of success stories, I remember earlier this year we had, there was a case of a constituency project that was that was carried out by one of the federal law makers, and when the job was done, it wasn’t done to satisfaction.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 25:29
And so what did the citizens do? They mobilise themselves, and they use the information on our Shine Your Eye platform, where they were able to get contact details of their elected representative, and they sent him an email.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 25:40
Interestingly, when you when you send an email through our platform, you also get to copy us in the email as well. What that helps is we can then, because this is the work that we do, we can then help to facilitate engagement when necessary, and just ensure that the the process goes through, or we link you with a partner organisation who is focused on whatever the issues that the citizens are raising.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 26:04
And so when this this community reached out to their lawmaker, we were copied into the email, and so we could see the process of the engagement.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:47
And what happened was they reached out with all the facts and information, and the lawmaker was challenged to respond, and he responded, and carried out an investigation on that project to see that it is rectified, and this is just like one of the success stories that we have from the Shine Your Eye platform and how that when you create an opportunity, or you bridge that communication gap between citizens and the elected representatives, then we can begin to see a bit more engagement and give citizens the opportunity to speak and use their voice and power as citizens.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:47
And then I think the last one I’m going to talk about was and even just how we use this for campaigns and especially advocacy work earlier in the year as well.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:47
There were some issues. There were some situations going on in our Senate, in the Senate chamber in Nigeria, where we had to rally citizens to engage their lawmakers on on issues around state of emergency and issues around the suspension of a lawmaker, and because we had the Shine Your Eye platform, which we have, is always undergoing updates just to make sure that our database is accurate and is complete.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:47
Citizens were able to reach out to their lawmakers through calls, text messages, DMs. I also reached out to my senator as well to be able to engage on that, on those issues.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:47
So that’s really what we are doing with Shine Your Eye platform and the chatbots.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 22:47
And how do we measure the use? We look at it through, you know, unique visits to the website. We look at it through even just the campaign. So when we have campaigns like Ana, you know, just showed us what the campaign metrics are, we also go through that process of looking at our analytics, the engagement, how many people engaged – especially when we have hashtags. So those hashtags also help us to know, OK, how many people clicked on this in this prompt and things like that, how we use Shine Your Eye to afford pro-democratic movements here in Nigeria. Thank you.

Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh 27:33
Thank you. That was really, really useful. So our final presentation is from Joseph from Parliament Watch Uganda, who will be sharing their approach to disseminating democratic information.

Joseph Tahinduka 28:24
So I am a speaker. There’s a temptation to speak too much, so I’m going to use more visual impressions of the work that we do.

Joseph Tahinduka 28:33
I’m going to start with this TICTeC video, and this is me in the flesh in the video. You’ll be watching me in the video.

VIDEO: 28:41
In Parliament, why do MPs summon ministers and heads of institutions like Uganda Airlines to Parliament? Where do they even get that power? Let me explain.

VIDEO: 28:53
Think of government like a football match. There’s a referee, there are players and there’s a coach. Think now that when you translate that analogy, the referee in this specific case is the Auditor General, who audits every financial report of government every year and submits that report to parliament.

VIDEO: 29:15
Okay, that’s January, December, thereabouts.

VIDEO: 29:18
OK. Think of the coach. The coach in this case, is the parliament. The parliament is the one that calls in every ministry, every sub department, and calls them to answer questions about their financial statements every year, just like a coach would call every other player after every match and ask them what went wrong in the match – or what went right.

VIDEO: 29:40
Then there are the players who are the government agencies here. The very nature of democracy is that no-one has absolute power. Anyone can be questioned. So like we said, Parliament, constitutionally, has the power of requesting everyone who received taxpayers’ money to account for that money every year, and it has been tear and a curve time and agencies have been rolling every other day, as we are going to be–

Joseph Tahinduka 30:09
All right. So that was, that was our TikTok account. I’m going to proceed to the next and I’ll make commentary at once.

Joseph Tahinduka 30:17
So what you can see on our screen is a podcast episode on YouTube. That’s Marriage Bill 2024: whether it’s a triumph for women or a tool for oppression.

Joseph Tahinduka 30:28
So as you can see, it’s a podcast which has about 53 episodes right now. It’s called Policy Digest on YouTube. I think this is the part where I like sort of ask you to be a subscriber.

Joseph Tahinduka 30:43
But as you can see, we’ve covered work around decolonising philanthropy, the Marriage Bill, post legislative scrutiny around artificial intelligence, around political parties about surrogacy, there’s a bill in parliament about human assisted productive technology, about climate change, about so many topics, as you can see if you go there.

Joseph Tahinduka 31:07
During the Heat of the Uganda Parliament exhibition, we did feature activists and made a series to support the activist community in doing the kind of work that they were doing, that’s, that’s, that’s on our YouTube channel.

Joseph Tahinduka 31:24
Now, let me just get to X, which is Twitter. So as you can see on the screen, we have a Twitter account which covers Parliament proceedings on a daily basis. So as Parliament happens.

Joseph Tahinduka 31:41
We covered it yesterday when embassies had gone to Parliament to meet the speakers who are covering it. As you can see here, you can see this is the Deputy Speaker of parliament.

Joseph Tahinduka 31:55
So I’m going to start by saying my name is Joseph Tahinduka. I am a Programs Officer at the Center for Policy Analysis, and I’ll be telling you about how we are reaching the majority of Ugandan people who are the Gen Zs.

Joseph Tahinduka 32:13
Okay, so Uganda is relatively a very young country, 73.2% of citizens in Uganda are below the age of 18. Significantly, they are the ones who have the most proximate interest in using digital technology. What that means is that we have to reach them, because if we don’t reach them, we would be speaking to ourselves.

Joseph Tahinduka 32:40
So I will be highlighting what our audience is. So CPA does not see, per se, the ordinary person who is on social media as just the audience. We have categorised our audience into various partners.

Joseph Tahinduka 32:56
The first is civil society itself. We see ourselves as a source of quality information that can be supplied to Ugandan civil society to then enable them to hold a government to account.

Joseph Tahinduka 33:12
So we, through our newsletter on a regular basis, reach out to different civil society players about different issues to do with human rights, climate change, governance, such that with that information, they can be able to get to these specific people.

Joseph Tahinduka 33:29
So beyond the website, we really get the information now centralised in one location and send it via newsletter platform.

Joseph Tahinduka 33:38
We’ve also established a lot of horizontal linkages, informal but very effective, where civil society organisations that at the front lines of holding the government to account are able to reach out to us and we provide them with enough information.

Joseph Tahinduka 33:56
I’ll give you an example. Recently, we had a Uganda Parliament exhibition that was led by another activist organisation, which is called Agora. We have been, over like three years, supplying them very high quality information about information which is coming from parliament.

Joseph Tahinduka 34:13
The idea is that we see ourselves as to provide very important information which can enable quality accountability processes to proceed.

Joseph Tahinduka 34:23
The second is the media. And this is, this is quite, quite important. We see the media as a fundamental function or tool that enables us to supply information. And I’m going to just get right into that, just in a moment.

Joseph Tahinduka 34:39
So we have what we call the it’s just over here, the Parliament Watch Media Accountability Network.

Joseph Tahinduka 34:46
So we have over 74 members within this network. These are news editors in local radio stations upcountry. These are journalists themselves who write daily.

Joseph Tahinduka 35:00
These are people who, themselves, have an audience. What we do is to ensure that we share with them information as it comes in real time.

Joseph Tahinduka 35:09
Here is the deal. The deal is that in radio stations, the press have soundbites, but they also refer to what is happening, and this is on a regular basis.

Joseph Tahinduka 35:18
And Uganda as a point, as a nation has a unique dynamic, according to a recent report, which was done by Twaweza, they did highlight, and this was quite, quite important. They did highlight that 56% of Ugandans still rely on radio as a primary source of information.

Joseph Tahinduka 35:37
We kill our bubble, we float it out and reach out to those specific grassroots by establishing those horizontal linkages.

Joseph Tahinduka 35:47
Of course, it would have been our honor to reach directly, but we know that the work of enhancing democracy requires partnership, and that partnership requires that you know your place and then you see how to provide that specific perspective, and that’s like very, very important the media.

Joseph Tahinduka 36:07
So we harness that as a very, very important aspect of the work that we do.

Joseph Tahinduka 36:12
OK, let’s now get to the democratic majority who are the Gen Zs . So the Gen Zs are on social media now, there are very key characteristics of this user group that we have understood carefully.

Joseph Tahinduka 36:31
First of all, their attention span is so limited, and as a result, we used to do traditional journalism and we had to evolve. Around two years back, with support from our partners, that’s National Endowment for Democracy, and put up a multimedia studio.

Joseph Tahinduka 36:49
And what this multimedia studio does is that we we develop content, and this content is very, very and as you can see here on the screen right, this, this, this content that we developed, like the one I did start with, reaches them where they are.

Joseph Tahinduka 37:11
And we’ve been doing analytics, and we have to be frank, we have learned quite a lot in terms of how they could do analytics.

Joseph Tahinduka 37:17
We see some of these videos have 240 hours of watchtime – hours on aggregate, with 20 second to 32 second – someone watching 20 seconds to 30 seconds, like 11% ratio of the video.

Joseph Tahinduka 37:32
So we think that because young people are on social media, then we should find them there. And that’s what, pretty much we’ve been doing. So because of our unique case scenario, and I want to really emphasise this, TikTok in Uganda is a big thing, right?

Joseph Tahinduka 37:49
So you can’t keep on your website. Otherwise, you’ll keep uploading information there. You’ll be as good as our friends from the UN right? They have a lot of reports, but no one ever reads them, right?

Joseph Tahinduka 38:02
So what we do is that if a bill has happened on the floor of Parliament, we break it down, and then we get the video running on social media, and we ensure that that video travels as far as it can.

Joseph Tahinduka 38:17
We do this for committee reports in Parliament. We do this for bills themselves, for statements for issues, when, let’s say, certain agencies are appearing in Parliament, we run a poll on our social media platforms to ensure that citizens can send in their comments, which we then transmit to our contacts.

Joseph Tahinduka 38:41
Because, like I did say, we have quite a number of civic technology websites, but people don’t reach them. So sometimes, even when you have, let’s say we have an entire platform which, just in a second, I’ll show you, it has pretty much every member of parliament.

Joseph Tahinduka 39:02
I wouldn’t say it’s more or less, but let’s say it’s a parliament performance tracker.

Joseph Tahinduka 39:11
As you can see, you can easily go to, let’s say one district, just here, and you just go and see your MP but we know people rarely come here.

Joseph Tahinduka 39:25
So what we see, websites like an ocean. You know an ocean, it has very many rivers that feed into it. So when we make posts elsewhere, they link back to these specifics.

Joseph Tahinduka 39:38
So we have this information, we call them up and say, there’s this issue which has come up on our web, on our social media platforms, are you able to sort of get into that?

Joseph Tahinduka 39:48
As you can see, we have this website which has a parliament performance tracker. It has finance trackers which are able to relay the entire budget and provide meaningful insights.

Joseph Tahinduka 39:59
But we know people rarely visit these things. So what we do? We said, OK, we’re going to find you where you are. We will not wait for you. We will ensure that wherever you are, we find you there.

Joseph Tahinduka 40:14
So this is something we’ve decided to do deliberately to ensure that we do exactly that, as you can see, so the information that we have central in websites, even when we try to make it as accessible as possible, we’ve learned a critical lesson, which is that we must reach people where they are at, and that’s a very, very crucial insight, that we must reach them where they are at. And that is a crucial lesson that we’ve come to learn.

Joseph Tahinduka 40:46
And this is, this is quite, quite important, because otherwise you you will become like a traditional parliamentary organisation, which pretty much speaks to itself and writes very shiny reports, but which, if you were to look beneath, there’s like very, very, very little impact.

Joseph Tahinduka 41:05
So we’ve been very, very deliberate at ensuring that whatever we have, when our very beautiful trackers, we have the bill tracker, we have loan tracker. We have found we have really a lot of trackers.

Joseph Tahinduka 41:18
But we know that the current generation, at the moment, is on TikTok, and they visit websites, but not so much. For example, the recent data we received realised that over 9 million people visit TikTok.

Joseph Tahinduka 41:35
That’s 31% of the traffic volume in Uganda. 31% also visit WhatsApp. So we’ve progressed towards TikTok and WhatsApp to ensure that we don’t speak to ourselves.

Joseph Tahinduka 41:48
So in terms of how our other efforts feed into all these specific aspects, I think I’ve been very, very clear, we ensure that whatever is on our website is digitalised into video content, using artificial intelligence, using content creators to ensure that we have the impact of people getting to the kind of work that we are doing.

Joseph Tahinduka 42:12
So in action, in terms of the means with which we use we ensure that we reach them where they are. And the websites that we have are a depositor. They act as a place of record for those who maybe respond to our clickbaits and get to our websites, they are able to get to our websites.

Joseph Tahinduka 42:35
And our numbers are good. Our numbers are good in regards to how many people sort of visit websites, but we know for a fact that people, even when you have a link there, there’s so much traffic on the internet, you’re competing with people who are dancing. You’re competing with people who are doing other things that typically Gen Zs are quite interested in.

Joseph Tahinduka 42:35
So what we do is to ensure that this information that we receive reaches them directly and just if we are to just close in, as you can see, this is our Facebook analytics just last month, and this is Twitter right?

Joseph Tahinduka 43:21
2.7 million impressions, clicks for the 5,000 unique visitors at 18,000 these are our digital town halls, the CEPA convos, the studio that we leverage, as you can see on the screen.

Joseph Tahinduka 43:35
So we’ve decided to be very, very deliberate about transforming the way we reach young people, and that is quite, quite important in the grand scheme of things.

Joseph Tahinduka 43:48
As I end.

Joseph Tahinduka 43:49
So, the context of us operating in a nascent democracy, that’s Uganda, which is also is sort of turning to be a bit dictatorial to the extent that the democratic freedoms have been shrinking, provides a real platform for for digital and civic engagement, because already people cannot organizse physically because roles like the public order management have been put in place which don’t allow people to meet physically.

Joseph Tahinduka 44:28
So we’ve decided to take all that civic engagement that would ordinarily take place physically to the digital world, and we are going to continue this story, and we are quite grateful to this very event for allowing us to share our experience.

Alex Parsons 44:48
Thank you so much Joseph, that was great. So thank you to all three of our speakers. I’ve learned a lot there. It’s just making me have lots of thoughts I’ll write down later on.

So I’m sure any of the speakers would love to hear from you if you have specific questions after. Thank you again for coming. Thank you to our speakers for sharing your work. Again, I need to really think about all of that, and thanks for everyone else for coming to listen.

We’ll be hosting more of these TICTeC gatherings online between now and the end of the year. To hear more about these, you subscribe to TICTeC email updates.

The next event is coming next Thursday, second of October, on how to evaluate Access to Information or Freedom of Information implementation and make access to information projects more impactful. And have a lovely day wherever you are, you.