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Case Study: Strategic Communications & Grassroots

Telkom South Africa has run numerous campaigns involving grass roots mobilisation and communication. One was a few years ago in the Umtata-area village Coglan. Telkom has targeted politically influential towns to rollout out franchises free to the town and entrepreneur in an effort to boost black entrepreneurship and support communications initiatives in rural areas.

Our role was to communicate the programme, objectives and benefits to the community with the ultimate goal of winning community support. The challenge was that the communities were distrustful of Telkom that resulted from promises made by local representatives that were not fulfilled, and high levels of union representatives in the area that were in regular wage disputes with Telkom.

Our strategy was to communicate, communicate & communicate. Executives needed to fly to the town for meet with various religious and community leaders. The Chief was on our side, but he would not go against the pastors. We planted no more than three key messages in everything we said and did. We found other influencers – women, teens, the elderly – and worked behind the scenes to communicate their message.

In the end, the community supported Telkom. Telkom supports rural towns. Telkom supports black entrepreneurship. Telkom supports transformation through the availability of communications. Similar grass roots.