“Speaking Together, Acting Together:” Designing communication for trust, alignment, and collective action
In collective initiatives, communication is often underestimated, treated as an add-on rather than a core capability. Yet, sustained collaboration across nonprofits, funders, communities, corporates, and government depends on continuous, intentional communication to build trust, alignment, and shared motivation and identity over time. Equally important is external communication, which helps share learning beyond the collective, build wider networks, attract support, and contribute to a stronger, more connected impact ecosystem.
This session of the #CollabMatters series explores communication as a strategic function within collectives. It examines how structured internal communication helps diverse actors navigate differing priorities, build trust, and make decisions grounded in shared evidence rather than institutional interests, while creating equitable spaces where every voice has the opportunity to be heard and valued.
The session also highlights the importance of external communication - how impact organisations can build networks, share learning, and contribute to the wider ecosystem by making their work visible. Thoughtful external communication strengthens legitimacy, supports knowledge exchange, unlocks growth opportunities and enables others to learn from both successes and failures.
Drawing on real-world collective experiences, the webinar unpacks how communication when embedded in governance, learning loops, and daily coordination becomes central to sustaining momentum and enabling meaningful action.
To explore how communication can be treated as a core strategy rather than a support function, on February 25, Zibi Jamal (Director, Communications - Saamuhika Shakti, Sattva Consulting) moderated the third session of our #CollabMatters webinar series. She was joined by an expert panel featuring Varinder Gambhir (Country Director, India, BBC Media Action), Vivek Pradeep Rana (Managing Partner, Gnothi Seauton), Linda Hilmgård (Communications Strategist, H&M Foundation), and Sahana Jose (Chief Community Officer, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies).
Watch the video on YouTube:
Notes from the webinar
Opening the conversation, Zibi Jamal drew on her experience across corporate and impact communications to reflect on a persistent gap: communications is often treated as an afterthought in the impact sector. While significant effort goes into designing interventions, building collaborations, and tracking outputs, far less attention is paid to who shapes the narrative, and how. She emphasised that communication is more than sharing updates, internally and externally. It is about building trust, aligning what we say with what we do, centering community dignity, and listening as much as speaking.
This discussion explores how to make communications integral to strategy: investing in it early, moving from individual storytelling to collective narrative-building, and doing so with equity and communities at the centre.
What role does internal communication play in shaping a true collective rather than just a network, and how does it build transparency and trust?
Varinder Gambhir (BBC Media Action): Saamuhika Shakti did not begin as a fully formed collective. It evolved into one over time. What made that shift possible was sustained investment in internal communication, supported by a strong backbone and a funder that enabled trust, flexibility, and adaptation.
A key starting point was building clarity: a shared framework that defined roles, surfaced overlaps, and made explicit not just what each partner owned, but also where they depended on one another. This transparency was critical to working as a collective rather than as parallel actors.
Internal communication also helped keep the work grounded. Continuous exchange between on-ground partners and others in the ecosystem ensured that decisions were informed by lived realities—what resonated with communities, what didn’t, and what felt respectful.
Another important practice was aligning on a shared narrative. While each organisation retained its own voice, there was coherence in how the collective story was framed externally—anchored in common values like livelihoods and dignity.
The key lesson is that internal communication is not just a reporting tool - it is a core operating mechanism. When designed intentionally, it enables alignment, supports decision-making, and builds the trust required for a group of organisations to function as a true collective.
From a funder’s perspective, how do you see internal communications enabling collaboration, and what does it take to co-create and build the right channels and norms?
Linda Hilmgård (H&M Foundation): Internal communication is the actual infrastructure that holds a collaboration together. Across initiatives like Saamuhika Shakti and Oporajitha, it has been central to building shared language, enabling alignment, and fostering the trust needed to work through complexity.
Collaboration sounds easy, but it can be super tricky and messy. It requires constant alignment, intentional trust-building, and often uncomfortable conversations. One clear shift that signals progress is moving from “my work” to “our impact” - from individual contributions to a shared identity.
For funders, this means playing a catalytic role: setting broad frameworks, but creating space for partners to lead, adapt, and shape communication in context. It also requires embracing flexibility and trust-based philanthropy, recognising that collectives need time and autonomy to evolve.
Ultimately, strong internal communication, combined with funders stepping back, enables shared ownership, deeper accountability, and more resilient collaboration.
Where do collectives struggle most with internal communication, and how can they address it?
Sahana Jose (Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies Foundation): A key challenge is power asymmetry - where larger or better-resourced organisations, and sometimes funders, dominate narratives, while grassroots voices remain underrepresented. This is compounded by uneven communication capacities, language diversity, and gaps in digital access, especially in contexts like India.
As a result, communication equity cannot be assumed, it has to be intentionally designed. This means putting in place inclusive structures: multilingual channels, accessible formats, and practices like rotating representation to ensure diverse voices are heard.
Equally important is creating safe spaces for dialogue and dissent, along with clear norms for decision-making and conflict resolution. Without this, misalignment can lead to mistrust or disengagement.
Ultimately, strong internal communication requires consciously balancing institutional voices with lived experiences, ensuring that the collective’s direction is shaped not just by visibility or power, but by those closest to the work.
How is internal communication tied to morale building and sustaining a collaborative relationship over the long term?
Vivek Pradeep Rana (Gnothi Seauton): Internal communication plays a critical role in sustaining motivation. Yet it is often treated as a purely tactical function. In reality, when contributions are not seen or acknowledged, partners can disengage, and collective momentum weakens.
In many collaboratives, visibility is uneven. Anchor organisations and funders are often foregrounded, while on-ground partners remain unseen. Addressing this requires intentional design. Creating spaces where contributions are named, heard, and credited can significantly shift group dynamics.
Even simple practices can make a difference. In one collaborative, setting aside time in regular meetings for partners to share impact stories helped build recognition, trust, and renewed engagement across the group.
The key insight is that while governance can structure collaboration, it is communication that sustains it, by reinforcing a sense of value, ownership, and shared purpose among partners.
Why does the H&M Foundation mandate external communications for its partners, and how do you ensure it drives collective storytelling rather than feeling imposed?
Linda Hilmgård: For H&M Foundation, communications has always been a strategic lever for systems change, not just visibility. This is why resources are intentionally allocated for partners to communicate their work, share learnings, and help shift broader narratives.
In a collective, this can easily become fragmented, with organisations focusing on their own stories. To address this, the emphasis is on putting collaboration at the centre, encouraging partners to align around a shared narrative, while also finding opportunities for joint storytelling and campaigns.
Importantly, the mandate is not about control, but about enabling. It is supported by ongoing dialogue around shared goals and the role of communications in driving change. There is also a strong focus on transparency - sharing not just successes, but learnings and failures so that knowledge can travel across the ecosystem.
Ultimately, when communication is framed as a tool for collective impact, it opens up opportunities, strengthens credibility, and helps move the work beyond individual organisations.
How can funders better support the budgets and capacity required for strong external communications?
Sahana Jose: A key challenge is that communications is still underfunded and often seen as non-essential. Even when unrestricted funding is available, many organisations continue to prioritise programmatic spending over building capacity as per an internal survey we conducted with our grantees. This has real implications. In many organisations, communications are not institutionalised. Teams are stretched, and founders often become default spokespersons, limiting the ability to build strong, sustained narratives.
From a funder perspective, this requires a more intentional approach. At Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, this includes investing in communications as both a capacity and a culture, through capacity-building grants, dedicated storytelling grants, and support for different communication formats such as hosting events or a theater series.
These investments enable organisations to strengthen strategy, hire expertise, experiment with formats, and even buy equipment such as a camcorder even. They also open up opportunities for collaboration, through joint campaigns, shared platforms, and ecosystem-level storytelling.
The broader lesson is that communications needs to be resourced as a core function. Without that investment, organisations struggle to fully articulate their work, and the sector loses the ability to shape narratives at scale.
Vivek Pradeep Rana: Building on the response, he underscored that both funders and organisations need to more deeply recognise communications as a strategic, long-term investment. This means moving beyond measuring outputs (such as posts or media coverage) to focusing on outcomes and the change communication drives. It also requires patience, as meaningful impact, particularly behaviour change, does not happen overnight and needs sustained commitment.
How do you centre authentic community voices in storytelling while ensuring it drives real influence?
Varinder Gambhir: The starting point is to treat communities not as subjects, but as co-creators. Grounding storytelling in their lived experiences ensures authenticity and relevance from the outset.
This also means designing narratives around simple, actionable insights that emerge from the community. Campaigns like Wash the Dabba show how everyday actions can connect to larger goals—shifting behaviour, perceptions, and even influencing policy.
A key principle is to centre dignity. Rather than framing stories through sympathy or deficit, the focus is on agency, contribution, and respect—especially for communities like waste pickers.
Effective storytelling must move beyond awareness to action. Strong communication always answers “so what?” Linking narratives to clear behavioural shifts and decision-making outcomes across levels.
In that sense, the most impactful storytelling is not just authentic—it is designed to drive change.
How do we move beyond just publishing tactical reports to actually shaping narratives and influencing the ecosystem?
Vivek Pradeep Rana: The sector often defaults to reporting as a comfort zone, focusing on outputs rather than outcomes. But reports alone have limited impact unless they are used more intentionally.
A useful way to think about this is in three levels - first is documentation, capturing what happened. Most organisations stop here. The second is narrative-building, interpreting that data to answer “so what?” and making it relevant to the ecosystem. The third, and most critical, is advocacy. Using those narratives to drive conversations, influence behaviour, and shape policy.
Moving beyond reports requires improving the quality of documentation itself, going deeper into lived experiences, not just metrics. From there, collectives need to identify a few strong narrative threads and build sustained storytelling around them, in clear and accessible language.
Ultimately, the shift is from producing reports to using them, turning static outputs into tools that shape discourse and drive change. Crucially, communications must be treated as a strategic function, not a checkbox or a delegated task. It needs to be led and prioritised at the leadership level to truly drive impact.
In a collaborative with many partners, how do you actually design and drive a shared narrative?
Vivek Pradeep Rana: In collectives, the challenge is less about crafting messages and more about designing the system that enables communication. With multiple actors, priorities, and definitions of success, this requires intentional infrastructure.
Four elements are critical. First, a shared narrative architecture that aligns partners around a common purpose while allowing individual identities. Second, clear decision-making structures that define who communicates what, and how. Third, visibility protocols that ensure contributions are recognised and credited. And fourth, a consistent communication rhythm that builds continuity and trust over time.
Equally important is how credibility is managed. Stronger or more visible partners can anchor efforts, but the narrative must reflect shared ownership, creating space for others to be seen and heard.
BBC Media Action ran the "Invaluables" campaign without putting their own name or the collective's name at the forefront. Why did you choose to step back from organisational branding and build a neutral campaign identity like Invaluables?
Varinder Gambhir: This was a deliberate strategic choice to prioritise impact over visibility. The goal was to build public trust and shift perceptions around waste pickers, centering them as “invaluable” rather than invisible.
A single, neutral campaign identity helped reduce friction for audiences. Instead of navigating multiple organisational brands, people could engage with a simple, clear idea and action. It also made it easier for partners to adopt and amplify the campaign, strengthening collective reach.
Importantly, this approach kept the focus on behaviour change and dignity, rather than institutional visibility. Organisational identities still had a role in reporting and learning spaces, but for public engagement, the campaign took precedence.
The key insight: sometimes the most effective communication strategy is to step back from your own brand and let the work and the communities at its centre, lead.
What will it take for communication to be seen as collaborative infrastructure rather than an add-on and who needs to be convinced?
Linda Hilmgård: Communication needs to be embedded from the outset, not added at the end. It must be intentionally funded and built into the design of the collaboration, shaping how learning is captured, how stakeholders are engaged, and how the work evolves.
This shift requires alignment across all actors - funders play a key role by setting incentives, allocating budgets and integrating communication into the theory of change. Backbone organisations must design systems that embed communication into governance, decision-making, and shared identity. And partners need to invest in collective storytelling, looking beyond individual visibility to the larger narrative.
Communication has to be seen as a shared responsibility and a joint opportunity. When that happens, it becomes core infrastructure: enabling alignment, trust, and greater collective impact.
Finally, how can organizations shift from individual ownership of an idea to stewardship of a larger narrative?
Sahana Jose: In collaborations, A plus B is not AB; it is C. Partners must overcome the fear of brand dilution and build on each other's strengths to create something they couldn't do alone.
The shift is fundamentally from ownership to stewardship. This also involves pooling resources (data, media networks, research) and building common platforms that no single organisation could create alone. A neutral backbone or secretariat plays a key role in holding this collective lens, while clear attribution norms ensure individual contributions are still recognised. At its core, collaborative communication succeeds when it produces outcomes that are greater than the sum of individual efforts.
Audience Q&A
Q: How should impact be measured in behaviour change communication initiatives to capture shifts in attitudes, norms, and sustained behaviour?
Varinder Gambhir: Impact measurement for behaviour change communication cannot rely on a single metric. Instead, it requires tracking progress across a behaviour change ladder, starting from reach and awareness, moving to recalland understanding, followed by shifts in perceived norms and attitudes, and ultimately assessing sustained behaviour change over time.
This layered approach allows practitioners to capture both short-term communication effects and longer-term impact.
Q: How can communication in collaboratives be designed so the backbone remains neutral and trusted, while still driving alignment and momentum?
Zibi Jamal: Neutrality is built through intentional systems and transparency. Clear structures—regular touchpoints, shared governance forums, and designated communication representatives—ensure every partner has a voice. Alongside this, investing in capacity building, shared language, and safe spaces for dialogue helps bridge differences across partners. Over time, consistent processes and openness create trust through visibility and inclusion.
Vivek Pradeep Rana: Beyond systems, intent is key. How a backbone holds power and facilitates communication shapes trust. He also stresses the need to shift storytelling to communities themselves, rather than institutions speaking for them. True credibility and momentum come from authentic voice and grounded intent, not just well-designed structures.
Reading & Resources — all on the topic of collaboration from the backbone organisations:
This session was part of the five-part #CollabMatters webinar series on collective action. Stay tuned for upcoming sessions on measuring what matters and unlocking capital that supports collective action! For updates on upcoming webinars, subscribe 👇
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