Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

While travelling overseas, Australians are increasingly looking at opportunities to give back, volunteering to support a range of programs and initiatives including children. But visiting, volunteering or donating to orphanages can encourage harmful practices that put vulnerable children at risk of more harm.

The volunteers unit within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) required support to develop a digital campaign educating Australians on the risk of volunteering with children, as part of campaign to be launched in 2018.

Data Knowhow’s Lisa Cornish was engaged to produce digital communications materials on responsible volunteering, aimed at the Australian public, to be shared through DFAT’s social media channels. The material needed to be in-line with DFAT’s volunteering policy and public messaging, requiring Lisa to liaise directly with the volunteers unit to identify and formulate the text to communicate in the digital communications material. The material also needed to match DFAT corporate standards, including colour schemes and fonts, and for this Lisa liaised with the communications unit to receive templates as well as receive feedback on designs.

As volunteers are from a range of demographic groups, including ages, the material additionally needed to be targeted at a variety of audiences – and this meant developing different versions of digital products aimed to better reach each group. It was also important in this project for Lisa Cornish to be responsive. Within DFAT, there were a range of stakeholders contributing new ideas to better communicate the message on responsible volunteering. Lisa was available to quickly make changes to digital materials developed to support the needs of DFAT – including changing structure of brochures to meet new advertising standards.

All digital material was created using Adobe Creative Cloud products and was delivered as Photoshop files to allow easy editing and publishing by the Department. The final products, including brochures and advertising materials for social media, were delivered with a communication kit containing templates to share information on the campaign by email, on blogs and through social media.

The Smart Volunteering campaign was launched by Julie Bishop in April 2018.