Aspen Comms Lab: How to Make Social Communication in Ukraine More Effective

How can partnerships built around cultural and social change become truly effective? And why is simply informing people no longer enough?

On August 8, Aspen Institute Kyiv held Aspen Comms Lab, bringing together communications and marketing experts from business, media, civil society, cultural institutions, and government.

During the meeting of Aspen Institute Kyiv’s communications group, held in partnership with Starlight Media and the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition, participants jointly developed recommendations and solutions on how to ensure that social communication in Ukraine goes beyond informing people to actually changing behavior and, ultimately, contributing to building a good society.

Effective social communication can no longer rely on individual committed actors working separately from one another. Participants discussed the need to move from fragmented initiatives toward an infrastructure for collective action — one in which media, businesses, cultural institutions, the military, civil society, and the state work not alongside one another, but together around shared national priorities.

This means jointly defining national priorities for social advertising instead of having competing messages fight for audiences’ attention; building a distribution ecosystem that combines the reach of media, the trust enjoyed by cultural institutions, the resources of businesses, and the legitimacy of government and international partners; and developing new models of cooperation in which each stakeholder amplifies the impact of others — creating synergy rather than parallel efforts.

 

Another key question was how to move from informing people to changing behavior — and how to measure and achieve what truly matters: not merely reach, but changes in behavior and cultural attitudes.

Participants discussed changes in the way campaigns are designed and managed, including thorough preparation and qualitative analysis of audiences’ needs and biases, long-term concepts with clear indicators of behavioral impact, metrics for measuring effectiveness, and other aspects.

The outcomes of the meeting will serve as a basis for defining national priorities for social advertising and developing a new infrastructure for positive behavioral and cultural change — providing guidance for mass-media communication and new strategic partnerships.

We thank everyone who joined what has already become a regular meeting of Aspen Institute Kyiv’s communications group, and especially our partners — Starlight Media and the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition, as well as Olena Martynova, Marketing Director at Starlight Media and a member of the Supervisory Board of the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition, and Yana Honcharenko, Communications and Sustainability Director at Starlight Media.

Special thanks go to the event moderator, Andrii Kulakov, Community Program Coordinator at Aspen Institute Kyiv, and to Communications Manager Alina Kruhliak for coordinating the meeting.