ILRI Comms project insight 2014:
Publishing
Emaelaf Kebede
CKM Team Meeting
Addis Ababa, 2-4 February 2015

About this project or activity
Why is it important
• Research needs to have products that others can use
• Products need to be good quality, readable and well-designed
What we want to achieve
• Produce consistent good quality digital and print multimedia products for different
purposes
What we do
• Produce some types of products for institutional (brochures) or project needs
(photofilms)
• Copy edit and design products according to style guide, branding and templates
• Quality and consistency check blogs posts (Paul)
• Assist authors and comms colleagues to follow institutional standards
• Publish products online (print sometimes)

Publishing activities
What we did (2014)
• 33 briefs published
• 40 reports published
• 54 multimedia products for projects
• 19 institutional and project flyers and brochures updated
What we plan
• Re-visit design, quality and style standards, templates and workflows
• Enhance planning and priority setting (with research teams)
• Explore ways to better synthesize and promote messages in our products
• Enhance use of editorial freelance ‘pool’
• Introduce review tool [includes pipeline management]
• Recruit managing editor

What we learned
End of year urgent publishing demands
• Better schedule staff leave planning
• Devise contingency plans
Haphazard submission of documents for production
• Work to better streamline job demands
• Improve advance planning with researchers
Ensure good quality in-house printing
• Especially during big events
Teamwork
• The embedded communications colleagues are essential colleagues in this
work

The presentation has a Creative Commons licence. You are free to re-use or distribute this work, provided credit is given to ILRI.
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