Request for Communication Expert

• Introduction

The Arab Institute for Women (previously Institute for Women’s Studies in the Arab World) at the Lebanese American University is implementing this project which is funded by the U.S. Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) for the purpose of strengthening the relationship between existing civil society organizations and elected officials to increase government accountability and impact reform on gender related issues specifically parental leave policies. 

• Project Objective

The project's overall objective is to promote universal parental leave and progressive childcare policies among Lebanese working parents as an entry point to achieving greater gender equality in Lebanon.

This request for proposal responds to the third objective of the project, formulated as follows: Improved attitudes related to shared childcare responsibilities and parental leave within Lebanese families and the Lebanese community. 

• Scope of Required Services

The communication agency who will be hired is expected to create a communication plan according to the advocacy plan already created. The communication plan will use a massive online and offline media presence and will aim at promoting the draft bill and the policy brief produced and will be published within the context of objective one and the successes achieved under objective two.

This activity shall be undertaken for the purpose of creating and launching a national advocacy campaign with a creative communication plan to positively influence community’s knowledge and attitudes concerning parental leave and childcare responsibilities; development practices have proved that even if the legislative environments are enabling, communities’ attitudes need to be addressed in order for change to happen on a societal level. This campaign will center around one or two social media hashtags that will be developed released over Twitter and Facebook. Inspired by the #MeToo campaign, release a social media initiative (name and hashtag to be used will be decided on at a later stage with hired experts), that will ask users across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to tag the Institute in their own personal stories related to issues of childcare and parental leave policies in their places of work. The social media campaign will also include a series of infographic video clips, no longer than 2 minutes, exploring the issues raised by the testimonials in Activity 1. These videos will tell the story of our social media campaign, beginning first with the exploratory testimonials and slowly building into the tens and hundreds of testimonials gathered under the #hashtag. In order to reach to the largest segment of the Lebanese public, the campaign will not be limited to social media and will use creative campaigning strategies. The implementation of the communication plan will be supported by the AiW at LAU through the team working on the project and the commissioned experts.

 (The advocacy expert and the company who will be producing the videos will be selected and commissioned by LAU separately). All coordination related to the tasks involving other commissioned experts will be conducted through The AiW at LAU.