Local officials and zone leaders of Brgy. Rizal in Makati City, Philippines set out plans on how to win social acceptance of the Makati Risk-Sensitive Urban Redevelopment Planning Project during a Strategic Communication Planning Workshop held last October 23-24, 2008 at the City Hall of Makati. The workshop participants went through a series of exercises on areas that are relevant to strategic communication and advocacy campaigns such as situational analysis and audience analysis, goal identification, monitoring and evaluation, among others.
Some of the key lessons harvested from the activity were as follows:
- Identification of key audience that they would like to target for their advocacy campaigns. They came up with a list of non-government organizations, home owners associations, business associations, church groups, people’s organizations, and schools.
- Determination of the community's preferred interpersonal communication strategies over mainstream mass communication media. They will make use of local channels to reach target audience such as parent-teacher association (PTA) meetings for the schools, house-to-house campaign for home owners associations, and monthly general assembly for business associations.
- Identification of training needs to enhance the capacities of barangay officials and zone leaders. These include
- Disaster risk management concepts and principles;
- Risk communication especially in popularizing technical concepts of earthquake risks and urban redevelopment planning; and
- Community disaster preparedness.
