Capacity Building Buyer’s Guide
Capacity Building Buyer’s Guide
This document is designed to provide prospective clients with a short guide to a Curzon PR capacity building programme. It outlines the thinking behind capacity building, how capacity building can enhance your brand, the processes involved, the benefits of capacity building and timelines.
What is Capacity Building?
Capacity building is about bolstering, and ultimately transforming, your brand’s PR/communications function via bought-in services from an external agency. By improving the ability of your team to meet communications objectives and goals, capacity building enhances the overall effectiveness of the company.
Our programme includes an assessment of your communications department and its impact on stated goals and objectives, a training and development programme for employees and the sourcing of new team members if needed.
Our evaluation and action plan covers all team competencies, from technology to basic in-house procedures.
These are the five fundamental questions that need to asked:
- Whose capacity are we trying to build?
- What is it seeking to achieve?
- When do we need to build it by?
- Who should deliver it?
- How will we know if we have succeeded?
There are three main types of capacities that may need to be built:
1. Functional capacity:
The management of capacities across all levels. These are needed to formulate, implement and review strategies, programmes and projects.
2. Technical capacity:
The management of capacities associated with particular areas of expertise and practice. Technical capabilities, for example, often tend to be drafted in via IT contractors with the skillsets to deliver highly specialised sets of needs.
3. Behavioural capacity:
The management of capacities needed due to cultural shifts and changes in attitude. This will affect a number of stakeholders, as there will be changes in attitudes, practices and behaviour across your team brought about by shifts in direction, policies, and institutional culture.
How Does Capacity Building Benefit Your Brand?
1. By building a stronger team – via the restructuring of your existing human resources; via new training methods; and, where needed, the drafting in of new staff.
2. By fostering a sense of ownership and empowerment, so that employees gain greater control over their future development.
3. Via a force-multiplier effect – the strengthened confidence, skills, knowledge, and resources that accrue from capacity building on one project often enhance the ability to envision and take action on other projects.
In summary, innovation and expansion through capacity building help to strengthen your resources, bolster strategic relationships and improve internal management and operations, increasing the efficiency of your team and helping you to meet goals and objectives.
The Process, Stages & Timelines
1. Assessment:
We will have an initial meeting with your senior leadership to obtain details of your current team structure, asking the following questions:
- What is the current level of capacity?
- Where are gaps in performance and capacity?
- What capacity is needed?
- How can our intervention best address gaps in capacity and performance?
- This process will take up to two weeks.
2. Action planning:
We will then create a conceptual strategic framework aligned to the assessment that addresses your priorities and goals. This process will take up to four weeks.
3. Action plan implementation:
We will assist you with any internal restructuring and the sourcing of external resources. If there are policies and procedures to be changed, we will help you with the internal communications process. If there is training to be put in place, we will come up with the most suitable plan. This process will take approximately four to six weeks.
4. Resource linkage and technical assistance:
If you need to draft in training/educational/IT resources for your communications team, we will make these introductions for you. This process will take approximately four to six weeks.
5. Monitoring:
- We will monitor the progress of your team and ensure it has adapted to any changes in the strategic plan
- We will ensure that any external resources are performing to the standards set
- We will monitor all training plans to check they are being followed and are on track
- We will reassess goals and evaluate performance – whether it was appropriate and adequate; and whether it improved over time
This phase will remain on-going across the life of the programme.
6. Evaluation and learning:
We will evaluate the overall effect of the capacity building programme. Did it lead to changes in capacity and/or performance?
This process can take up to four weeks.
How Do We Measure Success?
Tools
We use a number of tools to measure the success of a capacity building campaign:
- Post-activity evaluation form: team members are asked to rate their knowledge and skills before and after training
- Periodic follow-up with staff individually (e.g. via email surveys or phone calls) or collectively (via focus groups) to establish if they have performed differently (and in what way) as a result of the capacity building intervention
- 360-degree appraisals of staff
- Employee retention improvement
Indicators
Indicators that can be used to measure the success of a capacity building campaign include:
- Whether your team has improved basic knowledge and skills.
- The proportion of team members demonstrating improved skills in, and knowledge of, key issues
- Staff that can describe specific changes made to their practice as a result of the support they received.
- Staff that have applied learning back into the workplace as a result of the support they received
- The percentage of staff meeting their project responsibilities and roles from start to finish of the programme
Deliverables
- 1. A capacity building framework plan
- 2. Reports on evaluation and assessment
- 3. Advisories on any ongoing issues
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Capacity Building Buyer’s Guide
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