A Communication Manual for Partnership Practitioners

Talking the Walk is a toolbook for partnership practitioners from all sectors, to enable them to understand the importance of good communication to their work, and to help them develop techniques to improve their communications - both inside, and beyond, the partnership.

Talking the Walk is the fourth in The Partnering Initiative toolbook series, which deals systematically and authoritatively with challenges commonly faced by partnership practitioners.

Cross-sector partnering is becoming quite widely accepted and embraced as an important vehicle for achieving sustainable development and poverty elimination goals. But many challenges are still to be addressed if it is to reach optimal impact. As we suggest in Talking the Walk, these challenges have a significant communication component.

This book has contributions in the form of case studies, think pieces and tools from more than fifteen practitioners and covers communications as a continuum from the very first partnering conversation to a PR blitz of a successful partnership. Topics include: Richer Conversations, Hearing Unheard Voices, Inter-cultural Communications, Use of Images, Communications Planning, Assessing Effectiveness and much more.

The book begins by examining the realities of communicating in partnership. It then provides a series of guides, tools and checklists to enable better communications. There are a selection of stories and case studies about communication, reflecting the experience of a range of practitioners in the field. Talking the Walk concludes with an analysis of future challenges that partnership practitioners will face, and how communication skills can be used to meet these challenges.

"Cross-sector communication is not important simply for effective partnering.We are unlikely to find practical and lasting solutions to the worst horrors we face - whether in the form of pandemics, poverty, climate change or cross-cultural enmity - unless and until we learn how to collaborate. And we will never learn how to collaborate if we don't learn how to communicate." Talking the Walk, 2008