Launching West African Report For Global Off-Grid Lighting Association
The Brief:
The team at GOGLA approached us to coordinate the media and publicity campaign surrounding the launch of its latest report, 'Powering Opportunity in West Africa', funded by the UKAID and prepared by Altai Consulting. The highlighted the impact of Solar Home Systems and followed research conducted across Nigeria, Ghana, Togo, Cote D'Ivoire, and Senegal.
The Objective:
The objective of the PR campaign was two-fold:
(i) Create awareness of the economic opportunities and impacts unlocked by off-grid solar increase, leading to more support for the solar sector: including tax exemption on import duty of solar products and enforcement of standardization across the solar industry by the West African governments.
(ii) Ensure research findings are widely disseminated and turned into appropriate action.
Our Approach:
The first step for us at Nelson Reids was to identify the major stakeholder groups vital to the success of the project. Based on our correspondence with the GOGLA team and in-house research, we arrived at the following stakeholder groups: Government and policymakers; Investors; Social protection agencies; Energy industry practitioners and enthusiasts; and the general public.
Next, we mapped each stakeholder group to the intended call to action necessary to drive the off-grid solar energy industry forward. Once done, we then matched the combination to a media outlet whose readers were a close match with our segmented audience.
The Channel:
After taking a critical look at the media landscape in Nigeria with respect to the report, we opted to use only media outlets within the top 5 in the country- both to establish credibility and show the importance of the project at hand, as well as position GOGLA as subject matter experts whose recommendations and advocacy could bring all the relevant players together to solve Africa's power conundrum.
To achieve this, we targeted:
(i) Mainstream national print and online media publications to reach policymakers, social protection, and avocation agencies and the general public.
(ii) Industry-focused publications to reach energy practitioners and potential investors within the sector.
Key tasks executed by the Nelson Reids team:
(i) We worked extensively with the GOGLA communication team to develop press releases and blogs.
(ii) Distributed GOGLA press releases to the targeted media outlets.
(ii) Created a water-proof media relations strategy and ensured its implementation.
(iv) Media monitoring and evaluation to track all GOGLA mentions across the web.
The Result:
(i) The government of Benin introduced 100% import duty exemption on solar panels within 30 days of the campaign.
(ii) 12 top media outlets published the GOGLA press releases.
(iii) 980,000 core target audience reached.
(iv) 2 Print publications.
(v) 2 Opinion Editorials from the top 3 media outlets in Nigeria.
About GOGLA:
GOGLA counts Royal Dutch Shell, TOTAL, International Finance Corporation (IFC), Schneider Electric and many other prestigious organizations as members. Established in 2012, GOGLA now represents over 160 members as a neutral, independent, not-for-profit industry association. Their services assist the industry to build sustainable markets and profitable businesses delivering quality, affordable off-grid electricity products and services to as many customers as possible across the developing world. They believe that with the right support, the off-grid solar market can scale to provide affordable solar power products and services to provide electricity to the 840 million people currently living without energy by 2030, in line with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7. For more, visit gogla.com.