Top Media Consultancies in Geneva for Effective Communication

Crosslines Essential Media (UK) Ltd offers your organization expertise and collaboration on a consultancy basis with professional editors, journalists, writers, photographers and producers in the Lake Geneva region as well as the services of more than 1,500 local, regional and global editors, reporters, photographers, film-makers, producers, designers and social media experts who are part of the worldwide Media Action International Journalism Network.

Please find more details below. Otherwise, contact us at:

Crosslines Essential Media (UK), Ltd. Geneva Bureau: C-517, Palais des Nations, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland. Tel. 41-(0)22-917-1448 Email: essentialmediaconsult@gmail.com

Our specialties:

• Editing, writing & reporting
• Journalism workshops on global themes
• Personalized media & communications training
• Development of effective media strategies & public awareness initiatives
• Social media development with quality content
• Video & radio production, plus voiceovers
• Television documentaries
• Illustrated books, comic books/BD for younger and/or illiterate audiences
• Development of online games for both young and old as part of your media strategy
• Basic training for citizen journalists
• Lifeline media initiatives

A. Media: Making your message count!

For the generalist:

• Understanding today’s fast evolving media environment
• How to handle journalists
• Developing quality content
• Write press releases and information briefs that have impact
• Outreach in conflict and crisis situations.
• Mastering the dynamics of social media

For the specialist:

• Pushing credible outreach strategies to the next level
• Getting the media on message
• Beyond the press release: making an impression in an era of information overload
• Annual Reports that are dynamic and persuasive
• Headlines that work
• Vision statements that define your organization and unify your staff

B. Developing effective media strategies

Reports, websites and twitter do not work in isolation. If you want people to act on your initiative, you need a comprehensive strategy that focuses all of your media assets on your objective.

• Brainstorming and thinking ‘out-of-the-box’ with top journalists will help you to hammer out your action plan with insights and suggestions that are both frank and pragmatic. Imagination is important, but we will also help you explore what can work, and what won’t. More important, we will explain why.
• Developing effective public outreach: We can connect you with expert advice or produce a strategy for you.
• Global theme workshops: Whether focusing on climate change, access to health, food security or humanitarian response, workshops involving local, regional and international editors and journalists from the world-over can prove your most effective means for stimulating media coverage as well as expanding your contact base. Given current realities of reduced reporting budgets, this will help provide awareness-building and access to stories that might otherwise never happen.
• Work in partnership: We can help you develop media initiatives involving partner organizations, which will help spread the responsibility by sharing resources, enhance your credibility as an initiator, and improve your public outreach. Such projects will focus on issues, not individual organizations. Journalists are not interested in public relations’ or corporate propaganda. They want stories backed by diversity in sources and information.

Quality journalism is key to promoting greater public awareness. Our members and partners have decades of experience running workshops with journalists in Geneva, Nairobi, Istanbul, Kabul, Islamabad, Cape Town and Boston. These 2-4 day workshops often include field trips. They have generally focused on humanitarian issues ranging from disaster response to conflict and post-conflict recovery, the environment, climate change, and protecting alpine ecology. Global theme workshops can form a highly effective component in your media strategy. Workshops produce significant media coverage and increase public awareness of critical issues.

C. Editing, writing & reporting:

Our experienced editors, writers and reporters produce annual reports, op-eds, books, photographic essays and video/radio scripts that are accessible, credible and, above all, interesting. We also undertake interviews with your on-the-ground representatives in different languages. Furthermore, we can help you explore co-production initiatives with local, regional and mainstream media.

D. Video, radio and television documentary production

Crosslines Essential Media and its partner associates have the capacity to produce mini-feature videos, radio reports and broadcast quality documentaries on affordable budgets. Our partners co-produce on a regular basis with major broadcasters including CNN, BBC, France2, ZDF, PBS and Discovery. We are prepared to deliver a wide range of options tailored to your overall media strategy.

E. Voiceovers: We have experienced journalists and broadcasters who are ready to write, adapt and narrate your videos and documentaries with British, American, Mid-Atlantic and other accents. Other languages such as German, French, Spanish, Russian and Italian also available.

F. Social media development with quality content

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram.) may be the new fashion, but content still counts. Different audiences (young, old, male, female, urban, rural, right-wing, left-wing, educated, un-educated etc.) respond to different approaches. They all need to be reached in different ways.

We can help you develop a powerful media strategy that incorporates a broad communications platform with credible content ranging from print to electronic, and is aimed at both literate and illiterate audiences, or at populations caught up in crisis such as war and natural disaster.

G. Lifeline media

As the creators of the Lifeline Media approach in the 1990s (See Lifeline Media by Media Action International), we can work with your organization and other media partners to develop an effective information platform that is aimed at crisis-affected civilian populations, whether in disaster zones (earthquakes, tsunamis, floods) or conflict and humanitarian areas. This includes developing public outreach strategies that inform local populations via quality ‘humanitarian’ radio programmes, flyers, comic books, print magazines and newspapers, plus a variety of social media initiatives. This approach is particularly effective when it comes to working with local media as a means of promoting food security, health, agricultural, environmental and other development efforts.

H. Basic training for citizen journalists

Many media and international aid organizations find themselves forced to rely on untrained ‘citizen’ journalists. We can develop specific training components, including online education, aimed at helping local citizen journalists, be they refugees, local merchants or farmers, improve their craft to ensure more reliable information.

I. Writing, editing and production of print and electronic publications.

As a small publisher, Crosslines Essential Media (UK) Ltd. is perfectly placed to write, edit and produce publications, either for in-house or public dissemination. For publications to be produced under the Crosslines Essential Media name, however, the editors will have to assure that the content meets our standards and that there is indeed public interest. However, we can assist in the editing and production, including e-books, of in-house publications.

Past and current clients of Crosslines Essential Media and its associates.

BBC Trust (now Media Action), Canton of Geneva, DFID, Dupont, Dutch Foreign Ministry, ICRC, ICT, IFRC, Internews, Interpeace, IWPR, MSF, Swiss Development Corporation, Norwegian Foreign Ministry, UNICEF, USAID, Finnish Foreign Ministry, CIDA, SIDA, World Meteorological Organization, World Bank, World Water Council, Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, Asia Foundation, Fetzer Institute, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Rescue Committee, CARE International, UNESCO, OECD, OSCE, ECHO, EC, UNHCR, International League for Human Rights, Yale Law School/Schell Center, Afghan Ministry of Health, UNAIDS, AIDS2013, WHO, MDM, Aga Khan Foundation…

Contacts:

Crosslines Essential Media (UK), Ltd. Geneva Bureau: C-517, Palais des Nations, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland. Tel. 41-(0)22-917-1448 Email: essentialmediaconsult@gmail.com

Direct emails:

Tim Weaver, administrator: tim@wortha.co.uk

William Dowell, coordinating editor: wtdowell@gmail.com

Edward Girardet, coordinator editor: edgirardet@gmail.com