Getting to a Good Place: A message from our Founder
Since it’s now been nearly two years of the highs and lows of Good Place Comms, I wanted to share a little update on how things are going. [TL;DR: hold your nerve when things get tough.]
As many of you know, I left the Gates Foundation a couple of years ago for a swift and best-forgotten foray into civil service life. I lasted just four weeks, and chose instead to go out on a limb to finally set up Good Place Comms.
Good Place Comms had been in my mind for a while, even though it often felt like a fear-inducing shell of an idea. Having spent my career data-driving communication and advocacy efforts across multiple issue areas, I felt strongly that our community needed to share more about methods, and needed to better bridge the gap between academic insights and communication practitioners who are working to support public interest outcomes around the world.
Good Place Comms now works to support NGOs, governments and grant-making foundations in building public support for our collective, progressive efforts driving towards the UN’s global goals.
Good Place goals
My goal from the beginning was to spend about half of my time doing paid client work: to build, deliver and measure change strategies that would, in some way, help make the world a better place.
The other half of my time would be spent doing something related, but different: working with others to bring the research, tools and insights (which are available to – and paid for – by wealthy organisations) to public interest communicators everywhere.
At Good Place Comms, we aim to help advance our collective capabilities and grow capacity in how we design, deliver and measure our work. We also want to help advance the field of public interest communication, as an academic discipline, a method and an imperative.
Our work
Reflecting my own experience, having worked in multiple non-profit sectors, Good Place Comms’ client list is broad, but all focussed on public and planetary good. Our clients range from family foundations, global health institutions, climate NGOs (terrestrial and ocean) and environmental scientists. Having worked across so many sectors since my time in the Middle East, we’ve had some lovely recommendations and I’m grateful to everyone for their support and kindness.
We also work with academics and non-profits globally to share open-access tools and resources, and build curriculums to better support public interest communicators everywhere. I’ve pitched and developed ideas with a number of academic institutions and we recently made our first grant application with the University of Sussex to augment the next edition of the “Communicating Climate Risk Toolkit” by including a public interest communication methods primer. As part of the application, we proposed that we would develop this primer with public interest communicators, particularly those working in low-income settings.
I’m pleased to say our application was successful (yay!), so we’d love to connect with communicators and academics working in any geography or non-profit sector. We hope to learn, test and share what we’re doing so that it can be as useful as possible, and we’re starting to build a network of public interest communicators around the world.
Sharing the wealth (of data)
In addition to open-access resources, we are also hoping to share audience data to support communicators to build effective strategies. As part of our contract with the Gates Foundation, they agreed that any data we collected in relation to UN global goals could be shared with other non-profits. We’re also working on this with other foundations so that the organisations paying for this data can develop a better mechanism through which to share the research they conduct with their sectoral partners. There’s a lot of appetite and interest in this approach, which is exciting.
It got me thinking about YouGov, Ipsos, ORB and all the other research companies who often conduct this research on foundations’ behalf. I was an employee at YouGov many years ago so I know them well, and have since worked with most global research companies to understand more about audiences to improve our work. Over the years, our collective need for insights has brought them plenty of business.
While it’s not theoretically in their interests to share data publicly all the time (as they do need to make sales to stay alive), they shared massive amounts of data during the pandemic, which was really touching to see. So I wondered if they might be willing to share other things that could be useful to public interest organisations working around the world, or at least ask their clients to. And it seems they are!
Democratising access
A lot of donation-dependent organisations simply can’t afford polling, but it’s a valuable part of designing and measuring public interest communication. I’ve been encouraging the organisations I work with to club together, and I’m advocating for philanthropic funds to cover some of these costs, which takes time. But there is so much data already in existence which is just collecting virtual dust somewhere, and there should be a way for us to use it.
I gave this talk last year at the Frank Gathering on the topic of data sharing which explains more about what we’re hoping to do and why.
When I spoke to the research companies (and to be clear, a lot of research agencies do already offer charitable discounts for polling – just ask), I told them that ideally I’d like to build out an open-access repository where small organisations can go to search regions, countries and topic areas, and find whatever audience data was available. But since building these resources digitally costs money, we might just start with listservs and even email groups. The research companies have been really supportive and helpful.
As Good Place Comms does more, we’re attracting more attention from funders which means we might be able to make this sort of thing a reality. And while there’s still a lot to do in terms of building up resources, if you’d like to sign-up to receive updates when we start sharing insights you can do so at the bottom of this page.
Learning lessons
Going out on your own certainly isn’t for everyone. I’ve often thought that my slightly distracted, interested-in-everything, hyperactive brain needed a manager to help me deliver towards deadlines and goals, but I’ve realised that when you’re really passionate about something, you can surprise yourself.
Anyone who knows me knows I’ve always been passionate about understanding people (nosy) and helping make the world a better place (impatient). And as the warmer weather arrives in England, I’m starting to feel really positive about what we’re doing here.
Even though there have been months where I’ve been stressed, sometimes wondering if I’d be able to cover living costs, I’ve found that if you hold your nerve and believe in what you’re doing, you can somehow make it happen. (“Hold your nerve” is certainly the self-employment lesson I’ve learned and has become something of a motto. I’ve also learned that self-employed people aren’t allowed to complain about being busy, but I’m trying to unlearn that one.)
The investment I’ve made so far – in this idea and in myself – is starting to feel like it’s paying off. And I’m grateful to everyone who has helped and offered counsel along the way. Many of those (especially Ann Searight Christiano, Moky Makura, Annie Neimand, Joseph Walton and Natalie Hart), are just as passionate as I am about this stuff, and work in really interesting fields, should you need to find any experts.
Get in touch
If you have any ideas, thoughts, comments or connections, or anyone you think might be interested in the work we’re doing, feel free to send them our way. And if you got this far, thanks for listening and caring about our Good Place journey. That feels supportive too.