Impact case study database

The main beneficiary of the underpinning research has been DFID, which: i) changed how DFID conducted messaging research, and; ii) influenced its communication strategy, helping it to better make the case for aid spending to the UK public. The co-produced research provided evidence that was used to justify internal resource allocation at DFID and beyond, with the research recommendations incorporated into toolkits on how to communicate about aid and national interest, which, the then Director of Communications at DFID explains, are ‘now used as part of [DFID’s] guidance to those who work on aid communications across government’ [A].

i) Changing research practices and building capacity at DFID

Close and sustained co-operation between the academics and the team at DFID was crucial for providing the Department with the necessary capacity for designing, implementing and analysing public opinion research, and has offered a new model for how it conducts research and creates evidence-bases for policymakers. As part of the research design phase, the research team introduced DFID to new experimental designs [a,6] that could allow pinpointed testing of various demographic groups so as to test specific messages in relation to those particular audiences. This allowed for greater nuance in determining how various groups respond to aid messaging, which had not been available previously to DFID’s Insight Team. In response, DFID invited Davies and collaborators to co-produce a customized survey with DFID’s Insight Team. Between 17 February 2016 and 16 March 2017, Davies led two survey design meetings, one additional remote meeting, and over 50 email exchanges with DFID so as to develop experiments that reflected their exact communication interests. DFID worked closely with the academics at every stage – designing the project, drafting the questionnaires, analysing the data, and reporting the results. DFID invited Davies and Johns to lead additional refinement efforts to test out various narratives for DFID, specifically those related to economic interests, international leadership, health security and related messages.

By the end of this period the research team jointly produced a series of messages that were then used in a pilot study which was fielded by Prolific (a company which recruits survey participants) amongst a section of the British public [B]. A report on these initial findings led to further refinement of the messages that were then tested in a nationally representative sample in January 2017 by the public opinion firm BMG [C]. According to the Director of Communications at DFID, this research was ‘invaluable in helping address a specific need for our communications strategy, namely to better understand how we create messaging that demonstrates the benefits of spending aid to the UK’. Since DFID itself did ‘not have the budget to gather insight’, and therefore lacked institutional capacity, the Director adds, ‘without the support of these academics we would not have been able to undertake this testing to inform our message development’ [A]. Furthermore, DFID’s Communications Team’s approach to carrying out research and using research data was impacted, with the Director stating, ‘as a result of this project we were able to make a case to secure funding from another government department to gather further insight on the topic’ and that the methods they would take from the research team would enable this future research to help them further understand ‘how we can best land these messages with the UK public’ [A]. The insights generated, along with the subsequent research mentioned above, has also been used to train and upskill government communications colleagues for use in social media, ministerial statements, and press lines [A,H].

ii) Changing messaging on national interest at DFID

The research subsequently influenced DFID’s framing of aid in terms of national interests and led to changes in their messaging, enabling challenging audiences to be reached. The findings were communicated at meetings at DFID (October 2017) and via a presentation to DFID’s communication team on the 15 December 2017 [E]. This meeting included the Head of Strategy and Insight, the Insight, Evaluation and Branding Advisor, and the Senior Communications Manager. In response to recommendations from the team, DFID changed their messaging strategy as detailed below.

The research highlighted the importance of a focus on health security, since this has the greatest overall public approval results. A former Communications Insight and Evaluation Advisor at DFID explains that this insight ‘was shared with the [Communications] division to help understand how communicating about health security could contribute to ministerial priorities to discuss the national interest, reinforcing existing insight, and adding further understanding to how the department can use health security messaging to talk about UK aid in the national interest’ [F]. This was put into practice during the 2019 #100WaysAidWorks social media campaign, where specific examples of health security narratives were used by the Secretary of State for International Development to highlight benefits to the UK [A,G]. Key indicators of the successes of the #100WaysAidsWorks campaign were an average of 21,617 impressions per tweet (range of 4,201-45,691) with an average 1.033 engagement rate (range of 0.39-2.46). There was also engagement internationally across country offices – 432 retweets from country offices or international stakeholders and the messages prompting stakeholder participation including: Centre for Disease Control Group, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Unilever, British Council, GAVI Alliance, London Zoo, Gates Foundation, VSO, UNICEF and more. According to DFID, this number and range of engagement was ‘higher than the average engagement with DFID Twitter content’ [G].

The research recommendations outlined that targeting certain audiences, namely the ‘marginally engaged’ on aid, with national security messages is very productive in generating their approval. This group is generally sceptical about aid yet can be won round by messages that focus on threats to the UK. This was ‘a new insight’ for DFID and added to guidance for communicating with this core audience [F]. Additionally, there is a need for positive narratives about specific projects with tangible outputs, without foregrounding budgeting and expenditure. The former Communications Insight and Evaluation Advisor explains that this ‘reinforced current insight (…) indicating that focussing on storytelling on an individual level works more effectively than [a focus on] money spent’ [F]** *. The study also found that some messages previously used by the DFID team were too indirect to be understood by the public. For example, the causal linkage between aid in Ethiopia and jobs in the UK was too complex to communicate effectively. These research recommendations informed the production of national media-targeted campaigns picked up by national newspapers in 2019, where DFID’s 'major headlines' - those issues and messages highlighted as having greatest resonance with the public - were repeated. This led to increases in social media traffic supportive of the UK government maintaining and justifying its aid commitments. DFID has provided examples from this campaign [H], including stories about spending its overseas aid budget on the fight against child sex tourism, which was reported in the Times (April 2019), and how British law enforcement is accessing the overseas aid budget for countering extremism in Africa, linked to the terrorism threat in the UK, which was reported in the Sun (March 2019). The Sun article maintained a focus on national security, the primary concern of the marginally engaged, and on a specific project, whilst only making general claims about the benefits to the UK. Meanwhile, the announcement of the ‘What Works – Impact at Scale’ initiative funded by DFID, which aims to scale up effective interventions, test innovations, and influence a more effective global response to preventing violence against women and girls, resulted in an article in the Guardian (November 2019) with a strong national interest headline, where expenditure is mentioned only in the subheading (reflecting study recommendations), and a positive in-depth article about multiple UK aid successes [H].

The research recommendations have been incorporated into ‘a specific “communicating in the national interest” pack. This has been presented to the communications division and discussed with other departmental colleagues, with the core message for the division being to focus on making national interest messaging credible’ [F]. This guidance directly informed the work of approximately 50 staff working in DFID communications as well as communications teams in other departments drawing on the overseas aid budget, together with relevant teams, such as DFID colleagues working on jobs and prosperity programmes in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Trade. Thus, the impact of this research can be understood to have affected the day-to-day work of the Department in drafting ministerial statements, media lines, and providing advice to special advisers, Cabinet Office, and relevant ministers [D]. The new Secretary of State for International Development was briefed using the revised guidance when starting at the department in 2019, improving their understanding of how both they, and the Department, can effectively communicate in the national interest (see ‘#100WaysAidWorks’ above) [A].

Following the merger of DFID with the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in 2020, a Communication Manager at the new Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) explains that ‘the insights gained via this research now inform the wider comms strategy of the FCDO and are as relevant as they were before, potentially more so given emphasis in the prime minister’s announcement of the merger of showing how aid is spent in the interests of the UK’ [I]. The Prime Minister remarked: ‘we must mobilise every one of our national assets, including our aid budget and expertise, to safeguard British interests and values overseas’ [J]. To that end the research insights are now being shared and used in the new FCDO, including in training those working on aid spending [A].

Overall, the impact reach of the project can be seen in the fact that all staff writing government lines and ministerial statements are briefed on the national interest via the Communication Division’s guidance, which has shaped aid messaging to the benefit of the UK government [A].