Many of our members have felt in the last couple of years a growth in community division and polarisation.  Communication campaigns are a great tool to promote social cohesion in a cost-effective and wide reaching manner. Such campaigns can be led by city hall together with civil society groups to foster a sense of place based identity. Whether you are looking to improve your municipal communication strategies or build the capacity of civil society to get more involved in promoting community cohesion and social good but are not sure where to begin, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) have just launched a free tool to help.

Together with support from the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), ISD have produced the Campaign Toolkit, a free, multilingual, interactive resource for activists and organisations promoting social good and working to counter polarisation in their communities.

You do not need to be a counter-extremism expert, nor do you need years of experience to use this tool. Whether you are a young person interested in social activism or a manager at an organization seeking to promote cohesion, if you want to develop and deploy campaigns that counter hate, division and polarization, this tool is for you.

A Free Resource

The Campaign Toolkit is an interactive educational resource for activists and organizations looking to counter the threat of hateful, divisive and extremist content online and offline, through the promotion of community cohesion and social good.

The website therefore offers a wide selection of information to support this effort: among others, it features resources on campaign development, information on how to best leverage ad grants from the GIFCT platforms to increase visibility of campaigns and guidance on how to measure and evaluate impact.

A Guide for Activists

The primary functionality of the website is an interactive toolkit designed to guide users through a comprehensive but accessible campaign development and delivery process. This involves three distinct steps:

1. Plan – users are guided through the process of campaign strategy development, including identifying a theme (e.g. anti-Muslim or anti-Semitic hate speech) and the demographic they want to address.

2. Produce – users are guided through important decisions around types of content (e.g. video or photo content) and distribution methods, while being reminded to always think of the objectives they outlined in the previous phase.

3. Promote – the final step supports users in the deployment and amplification of their campaigns.

A Showcase of Best Practices

To inspire its users, the Campaign Toolkit also highlights historic and existing best practice examples of social good campaigns. Examples included in the toolkit span the globe and range from online to offline activities, from campaigns countering specific neo-Nazi ideology to those addressing broader hate speech, from video content to text-based campaigns, and more. Users will also have the option to submit their campaigns to be showcased.

If you would like to be walked through the campaign toolkit or speak with a member of the team to help you figure out how to use the resource, please contact [email protected]

The Toolkit is available in English, Arabic, Urdu, French and German, with potential for future translation into, among others, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesian and Hindi.

To find out more about the Campaign toolkit visit the website.