Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL)
Client
dial.global/
The Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) is part of the UN Foundation. They exist to realise a vision of “a world where data and technology serve people, society, and the planet.” Much of DIAL’s work is addressing what’s known as the digital divide.
Digital solutions continue to revolutionise how many of us live. But this revolution runs on an incredibly valuable resource – data. And that resource needs to be managed and protected.
Across the world, especially in low-income countries, people are often unable to meaningfully benefit from the information they produce.
This imbalance is the digital divide. And this is what DIAL works to solve.
DIAL works to offer thought leadership in a range of subjects that impact the digital divide. Their teams are industry experts in some very technical, wide-ranging subjects, including digital literacy, climate action, and international governance.
Often these experts are speaking live or writing thought-provoking pieces targeted at a range of audiences including governments, international organisations, policymakers and donors. So it’s critical these complex subjects are expressed with authority and clarity.
DIAL wanted to help their experts make their written work (presentations, expert articles) even sharper. They also wanted to focus on helping the team deliver presentations and speak on panels in a way that translated complex ideas into tight and easily-digestible messages.
Developing and delivering training workshops is something we have lots of experience in. Paul developed a series of sessions for Apple Retail to help their teams write in their newly mined tone of voice (that Paul also developed).
In addition, Paul teaches copywriting on the Masters in Media and Creative Direction at Madrid’s prestigious IE University. Since 2018, Paul has won four awards for teaching excellence and was awarded Professor of the Year in 2023.
Paul also wrote, developed and delivered the first English-language copywriting course for the online learning platform DOMESTIKA. His two courses are both bestsellers and have a student community of 75,000 with 98% positive reviews.
DIAL provides industry-leading expertise on some seriously impactful global topics – from climate change to data privacy and AI. So helping their experts to communicate clearer and more persuasively could influence some pretty far-reaching areas.
Craft has also developed and run training workshops for the Association of National Olympic Committees, FiftyDigital and Arup.
Our first aim was to understand exactly what DIAL wanted to achieve with its workshops. We chatted with the comms team to get to grips with what challenges they were facing. Then we developed a series of six workshops, with three focused on public speaking and three on writing. We ran each session twice to cater for different time zones.
By partnering closely with the client, we developed the content together, making sure we were delivering against everything they needed. Often we’d tweak the content between each version of a workshop to address things we learned in the previous session.
After each workshop, we provided a clear summary of the main points so the team had a reminder of the points we’d shared.
The team at DIAL was really engaged for all of the workshops, constantly asking questions and trying to understand how some of the new methods related to their roles.
This was a challenge and one we really enjoyed. Understanding how to take some seemingly abstract exercises and relate them to their world was an incredible opportunity.
Already the comms team at DIAL is reporting that there’s an increased engagement from their team when it comes to producing written work. Change in this area is often a little slow and sometimes stubborn, but with people beginning to see other ways of looking at something, it seems like the team is on the way to meaningful change.
We can do the same for you.
Let’s get started
Very professional and knowledgeable. I had a great experience working with Craft Words organizing communications training for the Digital Impact Alliance. They customized each workshop to our specific needs and industry, and were adaptable as new things came up. Our team had a lot of fun during the sessions and learned new strategies and techniques for writing and presenting. Arielle Diamond Senior Communications Manager, Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL)
Arielle Diamond
Senior Communications Manager, Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL)
All our projects start with a conversation. Maybe you’re not entirely sure what you need, that’s fine, we’re happy to explore it with you.