Image credits: Nihab Rahman/Food for the Hungry
Food for the Hungry
Finding and sharing the stories of resilient communities worldwide
The Challenge
Food for the Hungry, a global humanitarian nonprofit works in over 20 developing countries worldwide, walks alongside communities as they aim to graduate from extreme poverty. With over 3,000 employees, 98% of whom are local to the countries they work in, there are countless anecdotal stories from field and the 2,000,000+ individuals it has reached that would stop anyone in their tracks; stories of hope, health, education, relief, resilience, recovery and progress coming from some of the world’s most challenging economic and social contexts.
Food for the Hungry initially approached Yulu PR to help tell these stories to key audiences: grant givers, donors, peer NGOs and government representatives. However, through our strategic planning process, it became clear that telling these stories would be a complex task. Food for the Hungry needed a partner that would help them set up internal systems to discover, the most impactful stories not only to inform media pitching but wider donor communications, marketing and more.
The Solution
Yulu works continuously and closely with Food for the Hungry, not only their communications department but wider team members including regional directors and country managers across 18+ countries to learn about stories that deserve a public platform. In order to discover and distill the stories that best help paint a picture of what FH is doing worldwide and to encourage a collaborative approach to relief and aid among peers, Yulu built a story mining process to help the flow of information in a timely way, ensuring the plan wouldn’t result in additional work for teams working on programming and relief. The process consisted of calls to educate knowledge keepers (field and program teams) globally on what makes a news story, a set of questions for all regional directors and their teams to share stories of interest, a cadence of recurring meetings with country directors globally to dig into these stories, and a communications process to share field reports and data with marketing and PR teams as soon as information became available. The process also helped FH and Yulu communications teams to identify strong spokespeople from around the world who are available to offer insight into some of the challenges facing the world’s most underserved populations.
The Impact
Together, Yulu and FH have built the foundations of strong story mining and internal communications. The results have been not only smoother sharing of information and reporting across a variety of departments, but also feature coverage in key media outlets such as NPR, CNN, ABC Australia, Devex, and various humanitarian-focused podcasts. For the first time in its 40 year history, FH is getting deserved attention from top tier media and thought-leaders for its work in supporting communities as they graduate from poverty by taking a holistic and collaborative approach.