In this industry, clients often hire for a project, and when the project is done, that’s the end of the relationship. Projects can last a few weeks or months, and then it’s turned over. It’s seldom that clients develop the trust and a working relationship that lasts a decade, but it’s a milestone that’s been accomplished at Coherent Marketing.
In 2013, the African Leadership Institute wanted to transition from a web 1.0 site to something that would better reflect the work they did in developing the next generation of world-class African leaders through their flagship programme, the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship.
AFLI, as the African Leadership Institute is known, started in 2006. By 2013, the site they had couldn’t tell their story and didn’t showcase the Fellowship. I was brought in with a brief to review the site and make suggestions. My recommendation was they needed a new site running on a platform that could be easily updated with new content and to refresh the look of their offerings. The CEO at the time did a complete branding exercise, updating the logo and commissioned a local company to build a new site on WordPress.
By late 2014, the new site was in trouble. The site contractors had developed the site using a lot of custom code, badly written, and buggy. And the developers could no longer could be reached. The site couldn’t be patched, was in danger of being hacked, and content couldn’t be easily added. It was just a prettier version of the web 1.0 site. I was brought in again to review the new site and make recommendations. I made the recommendation to scrap the site entirely, migrate some of the text and images to a new site, and build a platform that would be able to evolve with the organization as they grew. The project was greenlit and I found them a contractor with whom I’d worked during my time with federal workforce development projects who had built me several sites in ColdFusion and Joomla. Once the site was redone in Joomla, I was asked in 2015 to provide continuing support in content and site development to better showcase the organization.
That was the start of the relationship. As a journalist and television news producer working in South Africa, I’d met and reported on Archbishop Tutu several times and was always struck by his humility, courage, and the steely resolve he so often disguised with deprecating humour. I recalled how he stood down a crowd threatening to necklace someone suspected of being a police informer and similar courage when he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. To work with AFLI, who had him as their patron was an honour. Over the years, I got to know many of the Fellows through virtual interactions, updating their profiles and celebrating their successes.
I developed a long-term strategy for ensuring Fellows would be found in internet searches as Tutu Fellows, as well as a plan to steadily and consistently develop a body of content that would provide long-tail results in internet searches. Despite never advertising, AFLI and its Fellows are prominent on page one in most internet searches of them.
Working for a small non-profit based in the UK and South Africa presented some challenges, including inconsistent staffing. We focused on the core elements of the organization – keeping Fellows’ profiles as up to date as possible, and providing support for the Tutu Leadership Programme.
Tutu Fellows must be nominated for consideration for the leadership programme. Until around 2018, most nominations came from the ranks of the Fellowship. Nominees were top drawer, but numbers were relatively small and the process of selection of the 20 people annually for the programme could be managed as it had been till then using email and Word document forms for the nomination, application process, and selector reviews. By 2018, though, the word was out. Sites posting information about programmes like AFLI’s, coupled with social media, resulted in a flood of applications. The process was being broken by its success.
Looking online at dedicated software to manage resumes and similar software was price prohibitive, as most were predicated on user logins. With hundreds of nominations annually for a single programme, coupled with unfavourable Dollar/Rand exchange rates, online prepackaged solutions were a no-go. I developed a solution for AFLI using Joomla’s fine-grained access control tools and directory software that was set up as a standalone site at TutuFellows.Africa.
Nominations were submitted by an online form that was exported into Excel and programme staff could eliminate candidates who were too old, too young – the age range for the Tutu Fellowship programme is 30-40 – duplicate nominees, and self-nominations. The remainder were sent logins.
The site is largely closed – during application phase, candidates log in, presenting them with an application menu, FAQs, help guides, and the form to complete to submit their application. The form creates a profile they can edit until the application phase ends. Candidates can see only their entry and nobody else’s data. At the end of the application phase, their user privileges are revoked and the site is reconfigured for selectors, making all applicants visible to users with selector access. On login, a selector menu with help guides, their entry allocations, and scoring guides are shown. They can rate and provide reviews of their candidates.
From the round 1 selection process, a separate listing of shortlisted candidates is created, with clean entries for the finalist selectors to review. Finalist selectors can see the ratings and reviews of the Round 1 selectors should they want to refer back to them, while having a clean slate of finalists to score and review.
By 2024, the TutuFellows.Africa site was managing close to a thousand nominations for the 20 seats available for the Class of 2025. The site provides AFLI with the ability to use email triggers to send regret emails to candidates not selected, as well as other bulk and batch functionality. The process has also been refined, adding FAQs for questions that recur, as well as standard operating procedures at each phase of the process to simplify operations.
During the ten years of service to my client, we also provided the online infrastructure for a Ford Foundation grant to create a database of programmes and initiatives to develop young leaders across Africa. It produced an online report in three languages and another directory on the AFLI site of these initiatives for individuals for whom the Tutu Fellowship programme might be a better fit.
We’ve also grown a mailing list from a few hundred people to around 6,000, to which we send a quarterly newsletter as well as emails to Fellows only about events and opportunities.
An ongoing goal of AFLI is to build synergy between Fellows to tackle Africa’s most pressing problems. For this to happen, Fellows must be able to find each other across programme years and different sectors. A private networking directory was set up with a broad range of checkboxes for sector involvement, AFLI groups, and other criteria for Fellows to be able to run filtered searches and then arrange the results and easily contact them either on their mobile phones or private email address.
And much of the programmatic material has been moved online at the AFLI site. The cohort of Associates for the Tutu Fellowship programme are given logins, allowing them to see a menu outlining all of the deliverables for the coming year, as well as forms for submitting assigned coursework. Upon submission, programme staff receive automated emails notifying them of the submission, making tracking of workflows simpler and saving them time with follow-up inquiries.
Since 2015, the site has seen a lot of development and expansion. It includes a reading library for Fellows, a listing of books and publications by Fellows to support each other, an ethics section, a substantial news blog of accomplishments by Fellows, and a range of reports. The site has been upgraded several times without issue to meet current browser technology. It’s never been hacked and Fellows’ data is GDPR compliant.
I’ve also provided strategic communications support at times when serious issues presented themselves, like when a Fellow was illegally arrested for reporting on government corruption. AFLI rallied support from Fellows and foreign governments, letting the government know their actions were being scrutinized and that they would be held to account. The pressure eventually resulted in his release.
Other projects have come and gone, like evaluations of software available to make networking easier for the Fellows. For the Fellowship, we tested the Meta for business platform called Workplace, that provides a Facebook-like interface for users and allows for groups and threaded posting, along with a range of other features. We ended that testing when they eliminated their non-profit pricing. We’ve also transitioned the organization to Microsoft 365 from standalone Office accounts, and from individuals storing files to storage in SharePoint. Inconsistent staffing – a fairly common issue for nonprofits – has seen me step up at times when there were gaps, and step back when the organization had greater capacity.
During this time, I’ve seen the organization expand from the founders to taking on a CEO, worked with three CEOs – one, Dr Jackie Chimhanzi, for nine years – and seen the Fellowship grow from around 180 to more than 450. In 2024, the site saw 900,000 page views, and the Tutu Fellows selection site another 260,000 page views for the short selection cycle.
It’s been an unexpected journey, going from a site report to sustained strategic communications and site development for a decade. But it’s also a reflection of the way in which my company can work with the clients it takes on – in a sustained, ethical way.
It is impossible to know what the future holds, but the message Archbishop Tutu shared with the Class of 2006 Fellows is something I take seriously:
“I want you to stand up against the evils that may pervade your society, be they corruption, greed, discrimination, intolerance, abuse or whatever. But I also want you to be the positive creators of opportunities for others to share the benefits of success and endeavour. Empowering and enabling others to succeed is as important and as rewarding as fighting inequalities. Caring, humility, vision and passion are hallmarks of great leaders…You are blessed with the talents of leadership but with these, come enormous responsibilities. I hope you are prepared to take up the challenge.”
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Header Image - Screengrab from the AFLI website.
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