Eight community engagement lessons from the last European refugee crisis (and how we can do better this time) by Alex Horowitz
Seven years ago, more than one million refugees and migrants crossed into Europe. This month Europe struggles to accommodates three times that number from Ukraine. Some important lessons from the previous response can help inform our approaches to communication and engagement with communities. Here’s a quick top eight.
Hire diverse refugee groups to lead community engagement. Refugees with relevant skill sets are ideally placed to stay on top of key refugee issues, facilitate two-way communication on the right channels, and identify pressing community information needs. They know best how their own communities prefer to exchange information and — most important of all — how to build trust with people seeking assistance. Don’t just hire refugees to be the frontline workers in community engagement projects, hire them to design the whole project. Or better still, fund and support the initiatives they create themselves. Refugees who previously worked in digital and in-person customer service, media, tech, and social sector outreach are already here in Europe. Refugees are already staffing community-based hotlines across Europe. Hire them, train them in navigating humanitarian and/or national social systems, and recognise that, as employees, they may need psychosocial support and extra flexibility.
Refugees can coordinate information trans-nationally, support them by helping fill the information gaps they identify. Just as in the previous crisis (the European refugee crisis that began in 2015 is referred to here as the “previous crisis,” but it remains ongoing) refugees arriving now are already organising into groups on Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook and other channels, supported by members of the diaspora. This is digital community-building, and we should engage with these communities. Refugee-owned digital spaces can also offer a chance for actual accountability, as refugees can share the experiences they have with others across the diaspora and at home, as well as tag or call out organisations in public posts. (See: the refugee-led Moria Corona Awareness Team’s post holding an aid organisation responsible for problematic comms and the organisation's response, which they also published). On the other hand, online groups can also facilitate the spread of misinformation, particularly when satisfactory official information is unavailable. Information moves as fast as social media (really, really fast!) and word of mouth, and the opposite of information is not an absence of information, it is false information and rumours. To get ahead of online rumours, you don’t need to systematically monitor refugees’ movements on a dashboard as if you are monitoring an experiment. Refugees are likely participating in these key online spaces already and can spot new trends and rumours as they appear. Then, quickly offer transparent and clear information — even, or perhaps especially, if the information you have to offer is that you’re not sure, or you don’t know, or a decision hasn’t yet been made.
Coordinate better to meet transnational information needs and have clarity and certainty in messaging.With no official information to explain what was happening, refugees will look for rumours, taking an interest in visually compelling and easy to follow narratives. In the last European refugee and migrant crisis, refugees were officially told that if they had asylum in one EU country, they could not move to another. And yet, some refugees who were granted asylum in Greece were allowed to stay in Germany if they made it there. This was widely discussed on refugee social media. So, with official information being unclear, they looked to information produced by smugglers, and lost trust in UN and government sources of information. At the time, it was hard for communication and community engagement (CCE) projects to verify the legal information about Germany needed by the refugees in Greece and Italy because most CCE projects were funded country-by-country; the information needed was in Germany, but no one was funded to do information gathering there. To avoid these pitfalls and provide clarity and certainty in messaging in the current response, we may not need to focus on scaling projects to multiple countries. Perhaps it would be better (and easier) to invest widely in strategic partnerships and transnational coordination among existing local and international community engagement actors, especially among those already working on information as aid.
Invest in staff or partners who know what information refugees need — and have the media production skill sets to deliver it. The idea that “the information is out there; it’s just not organised in one place” is a fallacy that time and again leads to staircase-to-nowhere information platform projects. At the start of the previous crisis, just as now, volunteers and humanitarian actors around Europe offered information to populate the bumper crop of new apps and platforms designed to help refugees. But in less than a year, the once-overflowing tap of information had completely dried up. The apps and platforms built to house this information quickly became useless as their information went out of date, frustrating people at best and posing a do no harm risk at worst. Information must be researched and verified, and content must be created and shared in the right languages, channels and formats. This is an iterative, constant process that must keep up with the speed of changing policies and of social media (see the previous point). The proper professionals — journalists, lawyers and legal aid groups, and social media practitioners, to name but a few — should be paid to create it and constantly update it. These skill sets exist among host communities and refugee populations.
Understand that social media is interactive. Social media is for highly responsive two-way communication and engaging, useful content, not broadcasting key messages into the void. Algorithms are actually designed to deprioritise your content if you don’t engage with users, and people expect to be able to respond to your content. If you choose to engage with people on social media (and you should), think of it as a hotline that requires staff who speak the right languages and are trained in responding to all kinds of messages, including protection concerns. Building two-way communication through social media and messaging platforms means refugees can access us and our services more easily, and in the spaces where they already are. It also means that, with the right tools, these teams can work transnationally to support community engagement needs as they arise across Europe. Social media-based community engagement has also allowed organisations to provide one-on-one support for vulnerable people who could not reach out for help in person, including people experiencing gender-based violence and LGBTQ+ adolescents in need of support.
People in crisis do prioritise communication with each other as much as any other - treat internet access as a human right. People need internet access to keep in touch with family, access information and follow news, but in the previous crisis, refugees across Europe faced huge barriers to getting and staying online. At shelter sites in Greece and beyond, wifi had been provided by international actors but was regularly down and painfully slow when it was up, and it came with paternalistic content blocks. The situation was particularly harmful in some locations where access to 3G was spotty or nonexistent. Unfortunately, refugee responders haven’t yet managed to consistently meet the need for internet access. Germany, looking at you here: Some refugees who arrived in the country years ago are still living without reliable access to wifi. This oversight must not be made again. We should cut red tape or find workarounds to ensure people can get data and/or access free wifi.
Budget for language diversity. According to CDAC Network member CLEAR Global/Translators without Borders, Ukrainians speak at least 20 languages, with the dominant two being Ukrainian (67%) and Russian (30%), and these figures don’t account for non-Ukrainian nationals fleeing the country. In a crisis, everyone deserves a two-way exchange of information, and the opportunity to make a complaint, in the language they prefer. Ensure services — and feedback mechanisms — are available in relevant languages, taking special care to ensure marginalised-language speakers have equal access. Include at least one language question in your surveys (“What language do you speak at home?”). Be clear in your communications about when and how services (and phone numbers) are available to which language groups. Make sure people can report Sexual Exploitation and Abuse violations in their own language and be understood. And regarding being understood, remember that accessible language is not just about which language you are using but how you use it. Plain language writing without jargon or technical terms is just as important.
“We (probably) don’t need your new app or platform”. For technology and “innovation” folks: this one’s for you. Already around the internet, there are tech sector-led initiatives aiming to “build an app” to “help Ukrainians.” If you can’t state the purpose of your project more specifically, and why it requires a new build, down your tools. Rethink. Many learned this the hard way when developing new app-centric projects during the previous crisis. In response to feedback from users who did not want it, our project to develop a new app was pivoted to operate primarily on existing social media to meet refugees in spaces they already were and engage in more effective two-way communication, but only after several small yachts’ worth of funding had been wasted on app development. Don't Build It. A Guide for Practitioners in Civic Tech from the MIT Governance Lab is a great starting point for anyone considering building new technology to respond to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. Remember that if high-quality, actionable information is aid, an app or platform is just the truck delivering the aid. Do you really need to invest funds and manpower into building new trucks, or are there some turnkey options available already? (Spoiler alert: In most cases, every social media or messaging platform is a turnkey option available already.)
If we take these lessons on board, including and especially by funding refugee-led initiatives and working closely with refugees at every level of community engagement work, we can create a much more effective and inclusive response than the one we mounted in 2015. This work will be facilitated by the warm welcome Europe has given Ukrainian refugees thus far. My hope is that we can ultimately apply these best practices, and new ones we develop, to work with and for other key groups in Europe, including the refugees from Middle Eastern and African countries and elsewhere who are also now in Europe’s cities, as well as its detention and deportation centers, and who have not received the same warm welcome.
Alex Horowitz has led on digital community engagement projects for several leading agencies and organizations since 2015, and worked on the European refugees and migrant crisis that began in 2015 from 2017 to 2020, leading digital Communication with Communities (CWC) projects. She is currently on the CDAC Expert Pool.
