Stephen King, Director of BBC World Service Trust, Discusses Media Partnerships and Measuring Impact
Interview by GBC Executive Director John Tedstrom
What unique competencies do you think media companies—and BBC in particular—bring to the table when it comes to the global fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria?
In terms of media and the BBC in particular, I think there is a particular added benefit in our engaging in these issues. The media has a disproportionate influence in terms of communicating with people in developing countries and it plays quite a critical role in providing people with information—the distributional reach that radio has, particularly in Africa, is quite unrivaled.
The BBC is a media organization with a long international broadcasting history and is currently broadcasting in 33 languages to 183 million listeners on radio a week. This provides us with an extraordinary opportunity to provide people more than the news and current affairs agenda. We can provide them with information that can help them live their lives.
How would you sum up the impact the BBC World Service Trust has had through its programs?
What we’ve combined is innovation and creativity, with a commitment to measuring impact, which has produced very explicit and measurable positive changes in peoples’ attitudes and behaviors around HIV/AIDS.
Through the BBC we are able to negotiate more leveraged deals—to talk broadcaster to broadcaster—and that that can help to have greater scale and reach, because we can use, in a most positive sense, the BBC’s name to open doors.
Several media companies are GBC members, including HBO, CBS, Viacom, BET and MTV. How is the BBC World Service Trust’s work similar to theirs and how are you different in terms of your approach to social communications?
We share many similar approaches, we share many similar objectives. A slight differentiating factor is our distribution platforms. The BBC’s are primarily in the developing world and are in local languages—in addition to BBC World in English on TV. So what I think we’re able to add to this suite of different companies and their approaches is an unrivaled penetration, particularly through radio, but increasingly now through TV, in places such as Nigeria, Ethiopia or Bangladesh.
What are your objectives in the coming years to help stem the spread of HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria?
It’s primarily to continue to look at innovative—and integrated—ways to provide people with information. One thing we’ve learned over the last few years is that just by producing programming by itself, without support services on the ground, tends to lessen the impact. Where we found our projects to be more successful is where they’ve been integrated with a nation-wide campaign, which is backed up by research and is delivered in conjunction with service delivery organizations.
One of the benefits we see of being part of GBC is that there’s a wide range of other partners, who have fantastic distribution networks—when you think of the distribution networks of Coca-Cola in Africa for example. There’s a huge range of other opportunities within the existing GBC membership for some creative and strategic partnerships that would really add scale.
How can companies from other sectors support or complement social media organizations like BBC World Service Trust in their work?
It’s about creating leveraged partnerships—thinking about what unique and positive attributes each company can bring to a particular problem. We also look to work with particular companies that want to share staff or help us to make our programs more effective.
For example we’re working with Microsoft at the moment to look at ways, particularly in Africa, that we can work together on common distribution platforms. Obviously certain business sectors are of particular interest to us: technology, telecoms, finance, healthcare, media and advertising, extraction industries, and those companies who are working in some of our countries of operation.
Our experience has shown that bringing more entities to the table, more minds to the particular problem, has always had a positive outcome for us—whether it’s other broadcasting, technology or mobile phone companies, or distribution companies, like Coca-Cola, Unilever or DHL. These all have their own fantastic networks and resources, and by working together we can make a real impact on this problem.
BBC World Service Trust has programs in over 43 countries, with interventions ranging from public service announcements to multi-year soap operas. How do you decide what media platforms to use in each intervention?
In Africa we’re talking predominantly about radio as the most popular mode of receiving information. But we have to recognize that the media landscape, in Africa and other parts of the world, is changing very rapidly. So one of the things we always do is think about how people consume media. And that could be very different between an 18-year-old man in Zambia and a 60-year-old woman in Zambia. Mobile phones are having a real transformative effect on the way in which people communicate with each other and keeping abreast of those technological changes is a really important part of our work.
I think the first step is to approach a new intervention with a little bit of humility, to recognize the value of what’s gone before and what’s working well locally. What we bring to the table is the ability to develop leveraged partnerships.
In India for example, we were able to negotiate free air time with Doordarshan, the national broadcaster, by providing a package of training and support to their producers. So that had benefits for all parties, in that the Doordarshan producers and partners were able to receive what was deemed to be good professional training. And then obviously the project benefited in that it was able to secure free air time as a result.
How do you take local cultural conditions into consideration in implementing an intervention?
In terms of cultural sensitivities, what we have done in all of the programs we’ve worked on is link up with local initiatives—that also means working with the government. For example, in Cambodia we’re working with the Ministry of Health, in India we’ve been working with the National AIDS Control Organization, and in Nigeria with the National AIDS Commission.
When we launch a new program, we try to do a baseline survey first to understand our audience. For example, if our target audience is young men between 18 and 30, we want to know what is their understanding of HIV/AIDS, what are the barriers to change, and what are the ways in which our messages will need to be adapted for local situations and local circumstances. What we don’t do is produce programming from Europe and then take it out and re-version it for a new country.
GBC has made a commitment to stepping up monitoring and evaluation, as seen in the extensive research of our Russia Media Partnership. What was the rationale for the BBC to step up its own focus on impact research?
Firstly, a desire ourselves to know what was working and what wasn’t working. If you’re producing the most fantastic TV and radio programs, but they’re not having their desired impact or their not reaching their objectives—whether that’s to encourage condom use or to get people talking about sex—we’ve got a real information vacuum there.
Aside from knowing what is working and what isn’t working, there’s also the ability to change mid-way through a campaign. With our TV dramas we’ve always tested the characters with audiences—for example in Cambodia we developed a TV drama called “Taste of Life,” which was broadly modeled on a hospital drama you’d have in the U.S. or Europe, like “ER” or the UK version called “Casualty.” What that gave us was a great opportunity to provide a format that people found entertaining, but also allowed us to explore a lot of medical story lines.
When we first tested the pilot, we found that some of the characters didn’t resonate with audiences—they found them unsympathetic, too pushy or too arrogant. So that allowed us to go back to the script editors before it went on air and say, “Hold on a second, this isn’t working.”
Stephen King has served as director of the World Service Trust since 2001. Prior to this position, Stephen worked for more than 15 years with international development agencies in Asia, Africa and in North America.
From 1998 to 2001 Stephen was based in Montreal and London as Executive Director of the International Council on Social Welfare (ICSW) a network of non-governmental organizations working worldwide to promote social development. He worked closely with the UN in New York and their regional headquarters in Africa, Asia and Latin America on policy development issues relating to the UN’s five year review of the World Summit on Social Development.
Previous posts include three years based in Thailand covering South and South East Asia as the Asia Regional Representative for HelpAge International, a UK based NGO working with older people and their communities. His London based experience included HelpAge International and work with VSO.
Stephen has undertaken a number of consultancies for the UN and other agencies on Civil Society issues in Asia, Africa and Europe. He graduated from SOAS, University of London with an MA in Oriental and African History.