A new communication strategy for Migrantas

The Challenge

Migrantas is a collective that provides visibility to the thoughts and feelings of people who have left their own country and now live in a new one, particularly women. By using pictograms they approach issues such as migration, identity and intercultural dialogue. All the stories behind are found in workshops that this collective runs frequently. The resulting drawings are then condensed into pictograms and distributed in public spaces.

Migrantas’ visual approach is unique since the pictograms, used as powerful tools of communication, are simple and universally understood but most importantly they become tools for empathy when people feel and share the issues and experiences of others. In this way, the collective now has a new challenge to spread their awesome work widely.

Workshop Process

In order to tackle the challenge our Strategic Design students formulated the next question: How might we create a communication strategy that spreads Migranta’s work widely? Having defined the challenge the students started planning the workshop. The first step and one of the most important was the role assignment, where work can be divided to get everything on time and well prepared: organization, the agenda, materials, tools, methods and dynamics.

Getting participants for the workshop was not an easy task, that’s why posters and social media invitations were shared and distributed across the university. Calling for help of friends and marketing experts was another strategy used by the students to contact participants. In order to create a succesful workshop the students created a detailed agenda with the schedule of each activity and what was needed. They had to choose wisely the specific tools and methods in order to get the most accurate ideas and insights.

First the students gave a brief explanation of the agenda followed by a fun warm-up activity to set up a creative atmosphere. Following this, there was an introduction about Migrantas as a collective and its purpose. The next step was a brief explanation about what is a succesful communication strategy for a brand/organization; linked to that, the students asked the participants to create a knowledge-sharing mindmap about what they think was missing in terms of communication (offline and online). With the help of this mindmap some interesting and relevant problems were clustered to be explored and discussed in groups. The students chose the World Cafe method (Rotating stations for ideation) to address these problems and to start generating ideas. In the last activity of the workshop the participants were asked to present their ideas using the Idea Napkin tool. Last but not least, in order to wrap up the workshop a final discussion took place to get feedback and improve the ideas.

The Outcomes

1. The first one: #mystory, an online campaign showcasing the experiences and struggles of being migrant women. This can create a sense of community empowering and engaging people through social media chanels.
2. The second one: Migrantas beer. As a key element of social sharing in Berlin, a beer is the perfect place to label pictograms with the aim of gaining recognition and difussion.
3. The third one: #Imanimmigrant. Linking the offline with the online world, the participants proposed an interactive life-size pictogram where people can be part of it and share it with the hashtag #Imanimmigrant on social media.