By Oscar Abello
When journalist Holly Gordon started researching the best interventions to solve poverty today, she and her team weren’t looking for a gender-specific or sector-specific solution. But they couldn’t avoid one: girls’ education, which became the clarion call in the documentary Gordon’s organization of the same name ultimately produced, Girl Rising.
Gordon, now CEO of Girl Rising, joined PSI President and CEO Karl Hofmann recently for a conversation with the Young Presidents Organization, a global peer network of chief executives and business leaders in 125 countries. They spoke about the challenges they faced and lessons learned in overcoming them as part of their respective organizations’ work to improve the lives of girls and women around the world.
“If you’re a journalist, the definition of an extraordinary story is if there’s a simple truth which, if broadly applied, would create extraordinary social good,” said Gordon. “That’s a huge story. Imagine if there was a pill that would cure cancer. That story would be everywhere. That’s how we felt about girls education.”
That message came as something of a surprise even to PSI, an organization with roots in women’s and girl’s issues like family planning and contraception. “Even we realized we didn’t have enough data about the scope of [educating and empowering girls],” said Hofmann.
“It’s been eye-opening how little we really knew our adolescent audience and how much we were missing about communicating with them,” Hofmann added. “So what are the tools we’re employing to try and address that? We’re using youth-focused reproductive health services through social franchising, designing approaches specifically to address young people. Using tools that should be obvious—social as well as traditional, including radio.”
Girl Rising and PSI share the goal of changing behaviors. “We decided we wanted to change minds, change lives, unlock new investments to organizations like PSI providing information and services to girls around the world, and to change policy,” Gordon said. “We needed to connect the head to heart to move people.”
“Brands matter,” added Hofmann. “Brands can drive behavior, and if your brand is really going to be effective at driving the behavior of your audience, where do you have to start? You have to start with listening to your audience. Understand what are the barriers they face in taking up those behaviors you know are good for their health and for the communities’ health.“
In order to reach different audiences, and to spark behaviors or policy changes that improve lives and opportunities for girls worldwide, both Gordon and Hofmann noted vital partnerships with the private sector.
“I think if you told me what an important partner Intel would be to the core success of Girl Rising, especially beyond the film, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Gordon added. “Journalists and corporations aren’t always the best of friends.”
Intel’s partnership provided key assets from the mundane—Gordon spoke of learning how to use Powerpoint from Intel staff—to the magnanimous. “Business leaders meet with policymakers all the time so they can bring social interests along with business interests,” to places like Davos and elsewhere, said Gordon.
Hofmann echoed similar sentiments about the value of partnerships beyond mere financial or in-kind support, saying, “One of the ironies that’s been fascinating is we partner with a lot of companies, but they all wear their mission on their sleeve. And we, sometimes, as an NGO take [our mission] for granted. We try to act like a private sector company because we think it means efficiency and speed and we forget about the mission.”
For more, listen to the whole conversation.
Follow Karl Hofmann or Holly Gordon on Twitter: @KarlHofmannPSI and @HollyGordon.
