A CRITICAL, INNOVATIVE INITIATIVE

Disasters and their aftermath –famines, pandemics, conflict, and migration– push 26 million people globally into poverty each year.

The frequency and severity of disasters will only be exacerbated by climate change.

Over the past few years, the World Bank has helped several vulnerable countries develop strategies to manage their financial risks. But several countries failed to implement these strategies because of lack of financing and technical know-how. That’s where the World Bank’s Global Risk Financing Facility (GRiF) comes in.

Through grants sourced from donor countries, GRiF helps provide vulnerable countries with financial assistance and technical expertise. Using these resources, countries can invest in disaster risk financing solutions and scale up their financial preparedness systems.

When disasters strike, recipient countries are quickly able to access funds for response, recovery and reconstruction.

GRiF was first revealed in October, 2018 at the World Bank and IMF’s Annual Meetings in Bali.  With the World Bank and IMF’s Spring Meetings coming up, the GRiF team wanted to ramp up their marketing efforts to underscore the critical need for GRiF. Attended by nearly 2,800 government officials, civil society members, observers, and hundreds of members of the press, the 2019 Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF seemed like the ideal venue for the official launch of GRiF.

Benedikt Signer, Senior Financial Specialist at The World Bank, had been impressed with our work on another earlier World Bank project, SEADRIF. When Benedikt contacted us to design GRiF’s launch campaign, we set up a Discovery workshop with the GRiF team to uncover the key objectives of the launch.

Their key goal was highlighting the benefits of working with GRiF. It was critical that the campaign inspire trust and urge the audience to respond. This was a challenge because GRiF was a new, complex initiative with no parallels. Also, it wasn’t just potential recipient countries that the GRiF team wanted to reach out to. The team also wanted the campaign to attract more donors and help get its own internal partners onboard.

BUILDING TRUST THROUGH COMMUNICATION

We chose to launch the campaign in two formats: an introductory video to set the stage and a brochure that would serve as a primer on GRiF. Through a storytelling, human-focused approach, the video would show the audience why countries needed GRiF. To create a deeper impact, we chose to focus the messaging squarely on the recipient countries. We reasoned that donor countries and the World Bank’s internal partners could be won over as long as the benefits to recipient countries were apparent.

To build confidence, GRiF needed to be easily understood. We designed the brochure and video around a comprehensive infographic that would explain the GRiF process and participants at a glance. The brochure needed to provide answers to any and all of the questions that sprung up in the minds of our target audience while watching the video. We structured the contents of the brochure using the 5W1H (Who-What-Why-Where-When-How) approach to improve readability and comprehension. 

Through collaborations with the GRiF team and our own research, we designed and sourced illustrations and examples to clarify and support complex technical information. In both formats, we used hard-hitting visuals, statistics and use cases to make a compelling case for GRiF.

To further bolster trust in GRiF’s mission, we dedicated a page of the brochure to GRiF’s first approved grant and funding success. The news had come in while we were still working on the campaign: the Mozambique government’s foresighted decision to partner with GRiF months earlier had paid immediate dividends. In the wake of catastrophic tropical cyclone Idai, the government was able to secure $8 million in early funding from GRiF.