Last week on September 28th, I visited Plan International Japan. (Picture #1)
I got SOW (Scope of Work) on September 19th and it turned out that I wil join a project with Plan International Senegal.
As I checked detail of the organization, I found out there is Plan International Japan (and the office is located 20 minutes walk from my house!)
As I talked with my colleague, she adviced me to visit Plan International Japan before I come to Senegal.
Thanks for the cooperation of Plan International Japan PR team and the colleague, I finally visited the office and heard interesting stories about the organization and their activities.
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1. Plan Sponsorship
Once you join Sponsorship program, you can donate money (couple of choices you can make per month) and you will get letters/pictures of "child" and their family, or yearly report in return.
Child is like window to see the result of your donation, but your donation will be spent by communities/regions or families, not only by your "child" directly. Sponsorship used to be 1-1 support (1 sponsor and 1 child) but now it becomes support for regions/local areas.
Plan Sponsorship focuses on 50 countries and the focus changes depending on financial situation of each country. For example Thai or Columbia becomes "supporter" instead of "supported country" with their financial development and stability.
At first I saw those letters from both "parents" and "child". Some of them are written in local languages, and those local letters will be translated in English by volunteers.
*I forgot to take pictures, but there were so many drawers and each drawer has its regions/countries name on it.
2. Focusing on "youth"
They used to have clear difference between "child" and "adult" at the age of 18, but they changed the structure to call young generation as "youth" and it has been their main focus of development assistance for long.
In our SOW, youth is also mentioned as their main target, and come to think of how to maximize the development assistance, youth is strategically the best choice as for the focus.
Title of our work is called "mapping of youth groups and creation of virtual communication and learning platform for youth groups" and this is my personal opinion, but I need to focus on how to support advocacy of youth group.
3. Difficulty of PR
Current Plan International's main message is "Because I am a girl" and you can see many posters and messages in public spaces such as train (picture #2)
The message is really strong, and people remember "Because I am a girl" rather than "Plan International" as for my personal impression. As I talked with Plan International Japan's PR team, there are positive aspects and negative aspects with the PR strategy.
Positive: Poeple can easily remember "Because I am a girl" message itself and become aware of Plan International.
Negative: Just because "Because I am a girl" is the current main PR message of Plan International, people tend to think Plan International is the organization focusing on only girls which is not perfectly true.
They said they need to come up with other PR plans or messages to spread the idea of Plan International supporting youth, and regions where people need support (not only girls.)
As I am currently working for Marketing and Communications, this is very interesting challenge that an organization faces. Just throwing 1 PR plan and keep doing the same thing is not enough, we need to keep changing messages, and techniques to achieve PR messages.
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Still, I cannot summarize all what I felt/thought when visiting Plan International Japan, but to know about the organization to visit is always good. If you have little input, you cannot have much output.
I just have 1-2 days before launching the project, but I will try to read HP of Plan International Senegal, project summary provided by Marie-san, and other materials provided for reference.
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