About social media for sustainable development

by Mark Dangerfield, James Breeze and James Schultz

Good communication is at the heart of all successful ventures. From family relationships to business deals or government policy initiatives, the ability to share information, ideas and provide feedback to both initiator and recipient is crucial for positive outcomes.

Development policy, programmes and projects are characterised by a multiplicity of stakeholders that range from villagers, land users and local community leaders to project team members, senior government decision makes and representatives of donors and development institutions.

All of these have diverse backgrounds and cultures. They hold a wide variety of views and have different capacity and requirements for engagement. Some stakeholders need only to grasp an idea whilst, others may wish or need to contribute directly to the public discussion and decision making process.

It is no surprise that many otherwise highly commendable sustainable development initiatives often stumble due to a lack of effective communication between stakeholders.

Information transfer and opportunity for feedback are challenging when using traditional communication methods. Social media tools when utilised appropriately by contrast can solve many of these challenges.

Technologies such as web-based discussion groups, social networks, blogs and newsfeeds can be succesfully employed in a range of scenarios, from facilitating broad public debates to supporting implementation of monitoring and evaluation programmes to actual project design and management.

These technologies are fast, accessible and flexible. They allow stakeholders to access new information, absorb knowledge and respond to a discussion as it happens, in real time all at minimal cost.

Social media tools for sustainable development

Whilst the potential of such tools is increasingly understood, succesful deployment is often suprisingly limited. This is often a result of issues such as over complexity, selection of the wrong tools for the job and under-utilisation (often because of unrealistic expectations of user tolerance for behavioral change).

The tools used here have been developed as part of a package of social media tools for sustainable development that have been specifically designed by GreenCollar Climate Solutions and Objective Digital to address these issues. These social media tools for sustainable development provide a framework for leveraging existing technologies and networks towards specific development communication objectives. The design has been informed by best practice thinking in development communication and technology usability with an emphasis on low cost, fast and simple solutions. For more information please contact us at:

Email: info@greencollarclimate.com.au P: Tel: +61 (0)2 9994 8033