This article is written by Zubair K. Bhatti, Senior Public Sector Specialist, Myanmar Office, World Bank

Let’s say that you’re working in development, and you have just led a project that has provided a local community with public services. You may also have published policy advice. Now you want more people to be aware of the service or policy analysis and recommendations. You also crave more feedback to help improve the product.

You want to raise awareness, and you want people to discuss and absorb your project results. You have organised a launch ceremony, issued press releases, and published an op-ed. You have spiced up the content with infographics, spammed your email lists, and tweeted core messages. But the engagement metrics are barely budging. What gives?

The reality is that development content is often inherently dry and dense. Unless it’s truly topical, exceptional, or controversial, it will struggle to compete for attention outside the narrow circle of usual suspects and policy wonks. And even these wonks may be feeling the pressure of information overload and decide to surf past you on to the next tweet.

Turbo-changing citizen engagement

While this isn’t just a problem in developing countries, the universal communication challenge is perhaps felt more acutely here. Informed criticism, vital to good governance, may be scant or muted because of the relatively limited audience more likely to engage in policy discussions or because the media ecosystem is underdeveloped.

This is in contrast to developed countries where civil society groups, think tanks, and academia all take an active part in public policy debates, such counterparts may be substantially weaker in developing country contexts. The number of development professionals in local markets who make impactful contributions to the dialogue and the government officials who have the agency to challenge the assumptions, methods, or findings of any given report or policy is also low. They may also not want to make open criticisms because of many factors, including not wanting to rock the boat.

So how can your advice claim more mental real estate in these contexts? Tech companies invite hackers to find bugs in their software and pay them heftily when they do. Likewise, competitions can effectively crowdsource ground-breaking innovation. Incentives and competitions work.

Increasing participation through the incentivised crowdsourcing of feedback will promote transparency and demonstrate integrity on the part of the organisation actively offering its products for scrutiny

Why not apply the same principle to help turbo-charge the weak engagement with development publications? In other words, why not offer prizes for criticism?

In late 2019, the World Bank Governance team in Myanmar published a review of subnational governance, finances, expenditures, and service delivery with the support of the Multi-Donor Support Fund. The Renaissance Institute (RI), a think tank, was the local research partner. RI also published fourteen more accessible policy notes in Myanmar, organised discussions, and publicised the notes on Facebook.

Cash for criticism

How likely is it that the policy advice on enhancing subnational oversight over service delivery will go viral? If we’re being honest, the odds aren’t great.

Maybe improving solid waste management in Mandalay. It is an extremely exciting reform, isn’t it? Perhaps improving intergovernmental fiscal transfers will gain a fan following. But I wouldn’t wait for it to happen.

The Bank team and RI announced a Cash for Criticism competition in April 2020 on Facebook, with a minor paid marketing campaign. This was to attract comments about “the assumption, logic, data, depth, relevance, and ambition of the recommendations or anything else about the quality of the policy notes.” The best comment — with all feedback to be posted on the public RI Facebook feed in Myanmar — on each of the 14 notes would win 200 dollars.

By the end of the three-week window, around 300 comments had been received, many qualifying as short essays. The announcement was shared 745 times. The notes about increased decentralisation of day-to-day administration and more female participation had received the most feedback, 79 and 58 comments, respectively. Land value capture mechanisms and property tax, perhaps predictably, garnered the least attention.

RI reached out to the winners for feedback on the process. Sai Kaung Htet, 19, is studying commerce in the southern part of Shan State bordering Thailand. When he saw the announcement on Facebook, he thought the content would be too technical for him, but he “tried hard” to win. Another winner, Cing Don Nuam, a 27-year-old woman who works as a community coordinator in Yangon, the nation’s largest city. She told RI that she thought that the competition would help “promote critical thinking and civilised conversation among differing opinions.”

U Aung Soe, a 62-year old man who is the former director of Social Welfare and currently resident in Mandalay, thought this competition promoted “a culture of transparency” and “provided a participation opportunity to everyone”. One winner, Mang Khwe Shing, a 28-year old man from Mandalay, was not impressed with the depth of the field. “There were only 80-90 comments on the note I was writing about, and perhaps only 20% had some merit”.

Low cost, high impact

The relatively low cost of this intervention has made it worth every penny. However, that’s different from saying that it can’t be improved. Several participants recommended more time to absorb the material and more promotion of the competition. Mang Khwe Shing suggested that cash did not interest him: “Certificates may work better to lure professionals for stronger competition”.

Dissemination and advocacy are complicated challenges. The depth of engagement with a core target audience may matter far more than the number of Facebook “engagements.” Yet, increasing participation through the incentivised crowdsourcing of feedback will promote transparency and demonstrate integrity on the part of the organisation actively offering its products for scrutiny.

An internship? Beach holiday for two? Dinner with the mayor? Next time you publish a report, these could be the bounties on offer to incentivise readers to provide you more and better feedback. This could help catalyse dissemination and transparency. It could also perhaps help make your findings more robust. ⁠— Zubair K. Bhatti

(Picture credit: Unsplash)