STRATEGY
Media Defence
Designing and co-creating a strategy from the ground up
Client: Media Defence
Service: Strategy Facilitation and Co-Development
Year: 2024-25
The challenge
How do you build a strategy that is ambitious enough to meet the needs of your communities, inspire donors, and move an organisation forward, whilst also making it practical enough for staff to use to meaningfully guide their work? This was the challenge facing Media Defence.
International human rights organisation Media Defence was already doing important work to protect independent media and support journalists, lawyers, and media partners in difficult contexts. But as global threats to media freedom change, alongside the organisation’s own growth, there was a need to step back, listen, and map out a strategic direction that would help enhance their impact and respond to emerging threats. This is where RES came in: to design and facilitate a process that could help the organisation reflect, make decisions, and move forward with more clarity.
Turning learning into strategy
Rather than treating strategy as a document-writing exercise, RES helped Media Defence design and lead a process from the ground up – one that could generate learning, build ownership, and produce something genuinely useful. We made sure Media Defence still owned the direction of the strategy, while we took on much of the process design, facilitation and supported the drafting work to reduce the burden on an already busy team.
The process brought together lessons from earlier evaluations and reviews, and complimented this with in-depth discussions with journalists, media organisations, donors, and staff members. We then brought the learnings from these discussions to the staff team to digest and workshop, with a clear emphasis on participation, realism, and honest reflection.
The process intentionally made space for some of the harder but more important questions: staff capacity, wellbeing, gender mainstreaming, organisational values, regional priorities, and how to create a clearer relationship between strategy, operational plans, and day-to-day decision making.
“Before we started, developing a new strategy felt like a burden on top of regular work. Patrick helped us navigate the process in a productive way, creating space for honest conversation, constructive challenge, and clearer priorities. For a small organisation with limited capacity, having someone guide the process and keep it on track was essential.”
– Carlos Gaio, CEO, Media Defence
Making the strategy real
A key part of the work was helping Media Defence move from broad ambition to clearer priorities, goals, and milestones. Our aim was to create something staff could actually use to guide their work.
As many NGO’s know, translating the ideas and directions that emerged through the process into writing which both guides and inspires is no easy feat – especially with so many competing priorities. This meant RES did much of the heavy lifting needed to move the process forward, such as providing templates and guidance to help staff draft parts of the strategy, conducting reviews and edits, and helping co-develop a detailed internal strategy as well as a shorter external version, while supporting the team to think through what implementation would require in practice. We then facilitated various sense-making sessions with journalists and media to further finetune the goals and objectives.
Longer-term value
By combining evaluation, consultation, facilitation, co-creation, and co-drafting, the work helped create a stronger foundation for future planning – one that was more grounded in evidence, more connected to stakeholder experience, and more useful as the organisation moved into its next phase.