Impact Communication
August 18th, 2025
Are your Communication Tools Creating Change?
A guide on how we ensure to build tools that work at grassroots level
Ankita Mirani, Social Designer and Founder @Social Innovation Studio
Archana A S, Communication Lead @Social Innovation Studio
Photo credit: Social Innovation Studio
What’s Inside:
In the development sector, every program intervention aims to make an impact. But between awareness campaigns, posters, and training guides, one question often gets overlooked: are our communication tools changing behaviours in reality, or just sharing information?
At Social Innovation Studio, we’ve seen this challenge play out across our programs. Even the most well-intentioned initiatives can fall short when their tools don’t connect with people’s real lives. The key lies in understanding how people actually process, relate to, and act on information.
Key Question: Are your tools creating the depth of change your program deserves, or are they just surface-level messaging?
In this blog, we’ll explore exactly what separates tools that inform from those that transform and how you can design communication that helps communities shift habits naturally.
Where to Start, When Designing a Tool?
Across our work in multiple sectors, including livelihoods, health, and education, we’ve learned one simple truth:
Most communication tools fail because they’re not designed with the community in mind.
Many are built around donor expectations or digital templates that don’t match the ground reality. To design for real change, we have to begin with mindset shifts and think from the user’s lens, not just the program’s.
Before designing anything, ask yourself:
What do you want the community to achieve with this tool?
What is their digital appetite and level of comfort with different media?
How are you delivering the message and through whom?
Principles That Make Communication Tools Work
1. Start With Real Needs
Understand your field teams’ and communities’ challenges before you begin. Create a supportive environment that helps them own the tools and drive meaningful engagement.
Action: Test your ideas with real communities early and often. User feedback reveals what’s missing faster than any report can.
2. Design for Context, Not Convenience
What works in an urban slum might not work in a tribal village. The same visuals, tone, or examples can mean completely different things in different settings.
Action: Create regionally tailored tools, translated into local languages and grounded in cultural references that people relate to.
3. Simplify, Then Simplify Again
Complex information overwhelms people. Simplifying doesn’t mean losing depth; it means making the message doable.
Action: Break down complex ideas into smaller, actionable steps. Reduce cognitive load so the tool becomes easy to adopt, not another thing to remember.
4. Engage Through Stories and Visuals
People don’t connect with walls of text. They connect with characters, stories, and visuals that reflect their lives.
Action: Use relatable mascots, illustrations, or community-driven stories. Build toolkits that are practical, usable, and feel personal to the team and context.
5. Translate Data Into Action
Data is only powerful when it leads to something tangible. Use it to guide your design decisions and make change measurable.
Action: Analyse what the data is telling you about your audience, and convert those insights into clear, visual steps people can follow.
6. Build for Adaptability
Different audiences need different approaches. A one-size-fits-all tool rarely works in diverse social settings.
Action: Create modular designs that can be adapted across sectors, tools that evolve with programs rather than stay static.
Case Study: Business Playbooks for Women Entrepreneurs
We partnered with a livelihood program in Delhi NCR that wanted to help women MSMEs grow their businesses.
The problem:
Women were overwhelmed by technical manuals and jargon-heavy business guides. They had motivation but couldn’t access information in a way that made sense.
Our approach:
We spent time understanding their real needs and daily realities.
Simplified content using visual cues and relatable examples.
Created characters and stories using the MINDSPACE framework to make content engaging.
Designed tools that were sector-agnostic and easily adaptable.
The result:
Four interactive playbooks that helped women confidently navigate business basics with simple, actionable steps.
We’ve detailed the full journey behind this program as a complete case study. Learn more here!
From Tools to Transformation
The best communication tools are the ones that are well-understood. They speak the language of the people, reflect their realities, and make complex ideas simple enough to act on.
Because when communities understand, they engage. When they engage, they act.
And that’s where real change begins.
At Social Innovation Studio, we design playbooks, guides, and journals backed by behavioural science that turn your program strategy into actionable insights.
If you are looking to design something similar, let’s chat and figure it out together. WhatsApp Us
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