Climate change has brought more impacts on a large part of the Indonesian population. Meanwhile, the level of attention from the government and the general public has remained insufficient. Despite the government’s continuous narrative on environmental and climate change issues, the narrative has the tendency not to portray the real situation on the field, and the implementation of environmental policies needs to be criticized. In comparison, the narrative pushed by civil society groups, consisting of environment experts, activists, and academics, is still lacking, despite possessing the most in-depth insights on the subject matter. Voices from civil society groups have the knowledge, data, and research findings that are valid and useful to inform the public. In response, Development Dialogue Asia (DDA) has engaged 20 spokespersons related to the topics to encourage the issues to the public. The challenge is balancing the narrative between the policymakers and civil societies on climate change (forest protection), green economy, renewable energy, food security, and indigenous people issues (land use, lack of ownership identity). The objective is to develop strategies to make civil society groups voice out the 5 topics mentioned above via digital and conventional media channels.

DDA entrusted ID COMM to create a strategy to convince civil society groups to increase the narration of the 5 topics and improve the quality of their communication style, as well as opening the opportunities to speak in various narrative channels. Firstly, ID COMM initiated an expert mapping of the 5 topics to gather insights from different civil society groups to enrich the 5 topics’ narratives. From this mapping, ID COMM developed communication programs in various channels such as webinars, podcasts, IG Live sessions, social media posts, radio talk shows, speaking opportunities, media briefings, and press releases/news updates. Before conducting the narrative process, these civil society groups were engaged in a capacity building program ID COMM, namely ‘Public Speaking’, ‘How to Converse In Front of Media’, ‘Media Landscape’, ‘Podcast and Radio 101’, and ‘Digital Strategies’.

From the communication programs, a total of 560 media coverages were attained, and 8 million exposures to media partners were recorded, while the podcast managed to attract 4,066 listeners with potential amplification through social media promotion. Furthermore, the IG live sessions managed to garner 265,324 exposures, and 282 participants attended the speaking opportunities. Also, the potential direct IG stories gained 32,218 followers. Overall, all 20 spokespersons took part in voicing the narratives of climate change-related issues, and discussions among them appeared to have further shaped the collaborative narratives. Each spokesperson proved to have strong knowledge from their experience and expertise in each assigned topic. Despite having different styles when communicating their knowledge, the spokesperson complemented each other’s perspectives to push the master narrative. Through training activities, the spokespersons have gained additional knowledge about communicating and dealing with the public through the media channel. During the engagement, the spokespersons started to take the initiative in linking their knowledge to current affairs – leveraging the public attention toward the issue. Furthermore, the campaign identified the spokespersons’ forte and matched it with the most appropriate narrative channeling method. And most importantly, the spokespersons have gained self-confidence for conversing in front of the media.