Dolna Banya, August 20-22, 2020
For three days – from August 20 to 22, 2020 BFPA’s team and Board together with representatives of key partners of the Association gathered at a outside-the-box work meeting in Dolna Banya. The public relations and civic law spepcialists Diana Damyanova and Ivana Murdjeva shared with the participants important accents of their professional expertise which are significant for better understanding the public environment as well as for communicating our messages.
The goal of the event was to analyze the needs of our target groups and of the environment we work in, bearing in mind the challenges for the NGO sector and the specificities in communicating with different audiences in order to be more successful when working in ”our” niche – health prevention, family planning, sexual and reproductive health. A short historical overview of the legislative environment and key normative documents was made.
We discussed to what extend are free media today, how to identify, motivate and sustain supporters, what is important when communicating in times of crisis. Other topics that were touched on were COVID-19, the hierarchy of instincts and some basic rules when delivering effective messages. All of the above mentioned, along with a plethora of other insider details about communications and law, is very valuable for elaborating and implementing the organization’s narrative today and helps us look at things from a different angle, rather than the usual one. The NGOs presume that everyone else sees and understands our causes as well as the immense effort we put in achieving them. Often that is not the case and it takes addressing the public as well as listening in to the needs and problems of the target groups we work for. We couldn’t pass the topic of social networks and fake news, this time it was discussed and rationalized from different points of view.
The meeting is part of the project “Capacity building for the team, partners and supporters of BFPA in the field of advocacy for SRHR” that is funded by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway through the Financial Mechanism of the EEA www.activecitizensfund.bg. The main goal of the project is to increase the capacity of BFPA teams and representatives of partner organizations and networks for advocacy and legal literacy in the field of SRHR
