Impact of Scotland-Malawi links: FEED IN YOUR DATA

Over the last year, the SMP has had good success raising awareness of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (the ‘Global Goals’). Our “Real People: Real Partnerships” pop-up exhibition was launched at our 2015 AGM and received more than 2.2 million Twitter impressions in the space of just a few hours (beating our annual target ten-fold, in the first day!) thanks to tweets by Ewan McGregor and others.

Tens of thousands of Scots have since visited the exhibition as it has toured the length and breadth of Scotland, across churches, schools, universities, government departments, conferences, businesses and community groups. It spent two weeks at DFID’s headquarters and in the autumn the UK Parliament’s International Development Committee will host the exhibition in the House of Commons. We are also planning to have the exhibition in the Scottish Parliament for three days in the autumn, during which all 129 MSPs will be invited to attend and tweet a photo of themselves standing with the SDG banner they think they can do the most to support.

We now want to strengthen our data and narrative on the impact our members are having on the SDGs by showing case study examples of the great work our members are up to. We will collect this data through a simple online survey, asking: how many are involved and how many benefit from your link; which SDGs your work relates to; where you are working in Malawi; how much is contributed to your links; what impact you are having; and how useful the SMP has been in supporting this activity. We will also invite you to email your organisational logo and one photo of your work with Malawi.

Once you have completed this survey we will create a special infographic presenting the information you have submitted in an attractive and engaging way, including your logo and photo. We will email you a copy as a picture file to check you’re happy with it and so you have an electronic copy to use however you wish.

In the autumn we will launch a special section to our website sharing these infographics and showing what impact our members are having across all 17 SDGs and all 28 districts of Malawi. We will also use this sample data to commission independent research estimating the overall impact Scots and Malawians are having together, updating our July 2014 study by the University of Edinburgh.

So CLICK HERE to get involved and submit your data.

Benefits of being involved:

• Have a special infographic created for you, highlighting your organisation’s impact – you’re free to use this wherever and however you wish.
• Have your project highlighted as a special case study on the SMP website’s forthcoming new ‘SDGs impact’ page.
• Have your infographic also displayed on your own member web-page on the SMP website.
• Receive an invitation to the launch of the exhibition in the House of Commons and the Scottish Parliament to tell Scottish MPs and MSPs about your work.
• Opportunity to have your infographic printed onto a special foam board for use at events and photo ops.
• Have information about your work shared with the national media as an inspirational case study.
• Feed into national research championing the impact Scotland-Malawi links are having.