Amnesty International

Working with Amnesty International, we took a skills audit and turned it into an ambitious project to engage everyone across the organisation in the strategic role of communications.

Our original brief from Amnesty International was to conduct an audit of their communications skills levels, in order to shape a future training plan for them. However, looking at Amnesty’s communications objectives, and seeing the potential for all employees to play a part in communications, no matter what office or level they worked at, we realised that this audit would have to reach much further across the organisation if it was going to learn from, and in turn engage, everyone who had the potential to be an ambassador for the Amnesty cause.

So, we conducted interviews with employees from London to Dakar, Johannesburg to Hong Kong, Sydney to Lima. We also followed this up with a survey sent to all employees in order to reach as many people across the organisation as possible. This wide breadth of research gave us unique insights at all levels of Amnesty International and allowed us to identify not only the skills gaps, but also the steps Amnesty needed to take to engage its employees across the world and realise the communications objectives it had set for itself.

We then shaped these findings into recommendations for a training plan which would set Amnesty on the road to realising their strategic objectives and becoming world-class communicators – the results of our research setting a clear benchmark against which future skills levels would be measured and monitored.

“Sword & Stone helped Amnesty International carry out a challenging consultancy across our broad and complex movement. They helped us by engaging deeply and personally with staff from around the world. They drew out unique insights that we had not thought of before and helped us not only identify a new path forward but also to see the communications challenges we face in a new light.”

(Thomas Coombes, Head of Brand and Deputy Director of Communications, Amnesty International)