Remember – it’s important to engage with your communities often, not just when you have something to say. Invest in building two-way relationships and close the loop. Use your evaluations and let them know the impact of their involvement.
At the beginning
Ask your colleagues or peers if they have any specific learnings from previous campaigns that they can share with you.
Set specific campaign metrics such as click through rate for digital campaigns. Your campaigns should be performing similarly across English and multicultural communities.
Test your creative and messages with your target communities. This can avoid any unintended consequences and provide insight into the potential effectiveness of your creative. Multicultural NSW can provide advice on the best ways to connect.
During the campaign
Ensure you are testing and iterating continually throughout the campaign cycle. Review your data regularly and act on your insights in real time. For example, monitor social media comments to gather insights on community sentiment and adjust accordingly.
Conduct A/B testing across digital platforms. Humans can be hard to predict. For example, small tweaks to wording can have big impacts to the performance of your campaign.
Wrapping up
When assessing success, multicultural campaigns should look beyond the standard metrics. Using qualitative rather than quantitative measures could give much more powerful indications of the impact of your campaign. Measures of success could be:
- attitudinal or behavioural shifts in the medium to long term
- impact
- empowering communities
- measuring recall or campaign recognition
- has everyone’s voice been heard?
Capture key learnings from a broad range of people
Share your learning across your own and other agencies
Selina Liu, Senior Advisor, Diverse Communications and Partnerships, NSW Department of Customer ServiceWhen rolling out recurring messages or campaigns that are delivered over time, ensure you make iterative changes and embed flexibility and lessons learnt throughout the process. Refining who the audience is each time will make your message stronger.
Case Study
Multicultural Communications in action
Geotargeted messages during COVID
COVID vaccination messaging
During the pandemic, the NSW Government CALD Communications working group had to think out of the box to make COVID-19 communications engaging and personalised.
A mix of existing data and ‘on-the-ground’ insights from Local Health Districts, Multicultural Community Liaison Officers, and Multicultural NSW and representatives in the community, provided real connection to community to help identify issues quickly. Sharing insights helped to drive meaningful communications.
Ongoing testing showed that community leaders, religious leaders and health professionals had high trust in their communities, and they were willing to act as key messengers. By quickly shifting the strategy to empower these leaders, the group held regular briefings with community and religious leaders to keep them informed and facilitated the creation of videos where they would talk directly to their communities.
Thank you
Gracias
Merci
Danke
This playbook represents the collective knowledge and expertise from a diverse range of people across NSW Government. They willingly shared their insights to help uplift communications to multicultural audiences; ensuring these communities are considered and included in every service and space.
We would like to acknowledge the contributions of the CALD Communications Working Group and multicultural communications agencies, including Etcom, Identity Communications and LOUD Communications Group.
Multicultural NSW is here to provide you with support and guidance every step of the way. If you have any questions, get in touch.
