Outreach and Social Activism: Archive in Action

This is it.

This is the moment you have been working for all along in the creation of the digital archive.

Of course, you want to preserve the content and save it for future generations. That is the ultimate goal. But, in terms of the people here and now, people who might have inspired you to create the digital archive in the first place—victims seeking ways to document their suffering and realize their right to reparations, or children wanting to know more about their disappeared parents, or a prosecutor who needs a credible source of evidence to start a war crimes case—this is it.

Outreach Strategy

Now, we can start developing those portals and online museums, planning our educational workshops and publications, inviting researchers and lawyers to start testing our search engines, for which we worked so hard to collect the metadata.

The ideas can overflow, especially once the archive has been built and the enthusiasm is high. It is important, however, to be aware that the organizational resources are limited and require careful planning for their most efficient use and the highest impact of the archive’s outreach efforts.

Image shared by FAMDEGUA, GIJTR partner organization in Guatemala.

Therefore, developing an Outreach Strategy that describes your outreach goals, beneficiaries, and plan of activities—one that can pay back multiple dividends—would clearly be a good investment of time. Outreach and other external activities of the archive are not only a way to achieve our activism goals—be it to inform, educate, raise awareness or seek truth, accountability, or reparations—but also to make them more feasible and attainable. An archive with a bigger presence and impact in the community, with wider visibility and credibility, will be more likely to engage a whole range of actors necessary for its long-term sustainability. This includes expert staff, users, CSOs, and other partners, donors, teachers, students, universities, supporters, mentors, journalists, and others who can and need to contribute to a digital archive’s successful creation, maintenance, and development; to its continuing life cycle.

Outreach Goals, Actions, and Beneficiaries

Any archive’s Outreach Strategy will clearly be highly specific, reflecting its unique context, content, and priorities. However, there are joint elements common to the human rights archives’ approach to outreach goals, target groups, and actions.

Goals

It is important to set our priorities, and to do so clearly. We might want to do everything with our archive, but that might lead us to achieving nothing. Depending on the organization’s capacity and resources, we might have more than one goal, but in order to keep our outreach work focused, we should not have too many.

When there is a clear priority, a major event, or a process in the community that would greatly benefit from our archive’s involvement, we should make it a clear priority and focus our resources on it. For example, if a country is in a post-conflict period and currently establishing a state sponsored truth-commission, the primary outreach concern should be clearly focused on the immediate effort to reach out to victims and the commission, and eventually provide support and archival material for the truth commission’s work.

The strategy should also make clear how our goals will be achieved—to operationalize them—to determine which concrete objectives need to be met to realize the goal(s).

To continue our example, our goal in this case might be to provide credible support to the work of the truth commission through provision of archival material. This goal could be achieved by meeting a number of objectives (e.g., reaching out and establishing partnership/cooperation with the commission and/or those appearing before it; developing organizational capacity to quickly search for, locate, and provide access to/copy of relevant material; and similar).

The objectives would then guide the development and tailoring of relevant outreach activities.

In this case, these could be educational workshops on the use of archives for victims and truth commission representatives, or hiring additional staff and developing a workflow for the quick provision of archival material to the commission.

Activities

If any general recommendations can be given with respect to development of outreach and socially engaged activities, it is to not be general, and not be led by templates. On the contrary, a human rights digital archive’s Outreach Strategy needs to be localized and tailor-made to listen and respond to the community to create ready-to-use, out-of-the-box solutions and channel its activities and messages through modes and media that can best communicate them. By doing so, it will achieve the most impact in the immediate community in which it operates.

Beneficiaries

In a different archive’s Outreach Strategy, this heading might read “Target Group” or “Audience.” However, those terms imply a passive status of a strategy’s beneficiaries, a one-directional communication from the archive to a specific group an organization wants to reach and to which it seeks to deliver its message or information.

Such an approach, however, would not be suitable for an Outreach Strategy for a human rights archive. Beneficiaries not only are the recipients of our messages, material, publications, workshops, and similar outreach products or services we offer, but also benefit from the archive’s outreach efforts—not through mere reception, but through being empowered and taking an active approach, engaging with and contributing to the achievement of the archive’s goals.

An Outreach Strategy for a human rights archive should therefore stimulate and support beneficiaries to use the archive to create their own projects. This should include a broad range of social actors—from victims and their families to artists and academics—who can all use their voices to tell the stories our archives contain.

There will always be more stories to tell from our archive that are worth it for a society to hear. The more and different actors and beneficiaries of our archive we can attract and engage, the louder and further their voices will be heard—and the more value and impact our digital archives will eventually have.