This month we returned to the Mont Alba school in the Limete neighborhood of Kinshasa–where we had initially visited as part of our pre-launch research phase–to set up one of our first official Rien que la Vérité fan clubs. The idea was to create a fun and dynamic setting in which we could meet with fans, carry out some story and theme exploration that could enable us to exploit some of the more important HIV/AIDS messages, and maintain some of the interest already established between the school and the show. This was the first test-run of a format we want to improve and expand, with assistance from our own actors and artists from LINA (L’Institute National des Artes) who have expressed particular interest in being part of our marketing efforts.

At the end of the day, the head teacher, who is the representative of the fan club for the school, was presented with a certificate and plans were laid in place for moving forward. We’re going to sponsor a football match between Mont Alba and another school, and are planning to move forward with a Rien que la Vérité Champions League. Watch this space!

Fabrice, one of our actors, is returning to his home town of Bukavu–situated next to Goma and set on the beautiful Lake Kivu–to get married. He offered to take a Rien que la Vérité marketing package with him and to spend some of his time in the area doing some PR and fan base building.

Cross-country travel is not convenient or cheap, so we’re gladly taking advantage of Fabrice’s kind offer. Fabrice plans to visit schools and local media centres, do some screenings at various places around town, and give a press conference, inviting local journalists to see what the program is about. It’s great news to be having some more concrete fan club action taking place in another part of the country.

We’re going to be represented at a US Embassy-produced Hip-Hop concert taking place on the 8th March in Masina, one of the most populous areas of Kinshasa, south-east of the city near the airport. It has been called little China to me by some Kinois, on account of quite how many people live there. I’ve visited there a few times actually, venturing from the main road so frequently travelled to the airport, off into the side streets filled with street vendors selling piles of peanuts, salt, bread, clothes, soap; and blindly witnessed many other activities that my naive eyes can’t quite detect let alone understand, but only fuzzily make out: it’s pretty crazy.

So anyway, for the concert taking place there, we’re preparing banderols with HIV/AIDS messaging to decorate both the venue and the stage and we’ll have representatives of our team there in their Rien que la Vérité t-shirts, spreading our word, collecting data from people who want to join our fanclub, and distributing leaflets with HIV/AIDS messaging. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend as I have to fly back to Europe on that very same day, but the oh-so-capable Marketing team will be representing the show in true form.

Serious disaster. After having been foolish enough to forget that the rainy season had started, we planned an outside Moblie Video projection that promised to dazzle Bandal, one of the more culturally sophisticated communes of Kinshasa, with our spectacle. We had Sapeur lined up to strut their stuff, we had our actors ready to animate and we had enthusiasm and motivation to bound. As soon as we had put up our screen, a big gust of wind came, took down the screen: and then the rain came down. The heaviest rain I had seen since the last rainy season. We hid in an obliging nightclub for about two hours, luckily with actors and musicians around us, who could entertain us. Unfortunately the bar staff didn’t see that this was their opportunity to make some money at a time they wouldn’t normally, and refused to sell us a beer for under 8$ a piece, so we just accepted their kindness with smiles rather than by buying beer from them. After two hours, we sent all the people who were supposed to be working home as public transport when there is rain is a total nightmare. We then slowly made our own way to our home - which had flooded - and to our dog, who we had left in the rain. What a sorry February evening!

Through the Public Diplomacy arm of the US Embassy here in Kinshasa, I was put in touch with the leader of the British Council Peacekeeping English Project here in Kinshasa, who was interested in using Rien que la Vérité as the subject of a three-day training session on materials development within the EFL classroom. This was exciting for many reasons, not only because the workshop was being held for a network of thirty teachers each of whom has access to classrooms of individuals within our targeted demographic but also, because it would take RQLV for the first time into the educational domain, where it lies comfortably within its genre of ‘edutainment’.

I helped to provide Danny with any resources he felt might be useful as well as inputting any my own ideas into his planning.

It was great to see RQLV being used in such a constructive way and to witness in action how it provides the perfect platform for simultaneously entertaining and educating. Danny’s was clearly enthusiastic about being able to exploit such a dynamic resource with so many angles from which to approach it. Either the materials speak for themselves or Danny’s enthusiasm was infectious: the classroom of teachers that greeted us as we went along on the final day, with Nicaise Mundo - who plays the character of Kokodikoko - in tow, was exceptionally receptive and excited by our (or Koko’s...?) presence.

I suppose I was a little surprised by quite how excited the group were - which you can see in the video where Nicaise takes the floor. Although perhaps I could have predicted it really: the Congolese love a good show.

We were to be the teachers’ reward for their having participated in three days of training, during which they watched Episode 1, participated in a HIV / AIDS session given by local experts, exploited and manipulated episode scripts into learning resources and then designed and presented their own lesson plans and materials on the basis of their session.

The teachers asked questions and made comments based upon the episode they had watched. The general reaction was strikingly considered. Again, I had underestimated the reaction; I hadn’t supposed that the attendees would be so reflective on RQLV as being an emblem of Congolese culture and indeed even that they would herald it as being so. Here is one quote I particularly liked from one of the participants.

The British Council will soon be promoting this workshop on their international website - I’ll post a link to it as soon as I have one.

We launched our ‘Who is Kokodikoko’ stealth campaign last week before our broadcast premiere, hoping to pique people’s curiosity and let them know that something big was coming. We made a couple of TV ads, strung up banderols (street banners) in some of Kinshasa’s busiest areas, distributed fliers (see above), and released teams of whisperers, who spent the week starting conversations with people on the street, in terraces, and in taxis, spreading the meme and listening to what people thought about it.

What we heard back was really interesting, and a little scary. One of the more persistent rumors spreading around town was that Kokodikoko was being sent to Kinshasa by General Laurent Nkunda (who threatened a few weeks ago to topple the DRC government if President Kabila continued to refuse to hold talks.) Fortunately, as quickly as the rumors boiled up, they simmered down, and people moved on to the next scandal. The campaign seems to have been a success, though. In fact, from our polling this week, more people seem to have heard of the Who is Kokodikoko campaign than have heard of Rien que la Vérité itself.

We are sending out our internally-recruited enqueteurs to carry out our first phase of large-scale quantitative data collection. Until we can carry out a national M&E program, we are going to extrapolate from the data collected through our Kinshasa-based surveys and corresponding data in sources such as the DHS (Demographic and Health Survey) in order to work out viewing numbers on the national scale. Kinshasa is a particularly difficult place to carry out such surveying: in my experience, people in the UK go out of their way to avoid strangers with clipboards approaching you in the street. Here, on the contrary, strangers with clipboards–our enqueteurs–stir up a great deal of interest. Our enqueteurs have told us of ending up with crowds of people around them, all wanting to give their responses at once. It is common that such interviewees are swayed by their friends’ answers, wanting to answer the same, or the contrary, or to make the others laugh–the conditions for accessing reliable data are not easy.

Well, we have officially launched! We held our red carpet event live on national television on Sunday, with invited guests from the local and international NGO world, local media personalities, musicians, and singers. We had a representative from UNICEF answering questions in a live interview, music from Les Washiba (the band of one of our actors) and played some 1 minute UNICEF films made by Congolese youth and addressing HIV/AIDS issues.

Once again thrown into a world of unknowns, as a personal and professional experience, it was wonderful–highly stressful and an impressive display of teamwork on everyone’s part. We carried it out on a sound stage at RAGA, the station the show will be airing on. The guests were as excited as we were, it felt, to be part of a live television audience. I think that as a team we were all slightly overwhelmed, and thankfully today was declared a holiday for all of us, who had worked late into the night for weeks getting all of the pieces of the jigsaw into place on time. Of course this holiday mode can’t last for long as we now need to work out how many people watched the show last night. Which is a task I am happy to leave until tomorrow!

Fiona Hovenden of research company Collective Invention, who worked with me on the set-up of the initial M&E phase, has left me in a haze of quotes, photographs, recorded voices and spreadsheets as we tried to formulate what we had found into a useful package of information and an eventual report. This involves teaching my colleagues, Dick and Eugenie, both new to the M&E world, about some of the rationale behind the norms of data collection, what makes ‘reporting’ valid and invalid, why, how etc.

The research phase had particular highlights of visiting families in their homes, being welcomed by excited faces who couldn’t wait to give us their opinions about what we were showing them and the questions we were asking of them. Another highlight was seeing a group of Lingala-speaking (and non-French-speaking) girls delightedly watch an episode of the show and afterwards, explain the story passionately to some of the other girls in the group who had not followed quite so closely. This reaffirmed our choice of language spoken in the show–the dialogue is written mostly in French so that it can be broadcast across the country and Francophone Africa, where people in different regions speak different local languages and dialects.

Exhausted from the initial research phase we are now hurtling towards the launch at break-neck speed and I am searching under bushes and stones for my Marketing Hat for this next stage. Which is very exciting!

We have been doing Mobile Video screenings of the show across the city, which have been really fun. Seeing 1000 people all react as one as Papy and Mamy go about their daily lives is great. And then when everyone sways in time to the music of Bill Clinton as he performs during episode 1’s nightclub scene, I do actually find it hard to contain myself! I try to hide away a little bit at these events as often having a mundele (white person) there can detract from the actual experience for people–they focus on me and not the show. I am super excited about the whole thing though, and can’t believe how quickly the launch on live TV is coming up now. I have only been working on the show for about 3 months–if I find it this exciting, I can’t imagine what it must feel like for some of the others who have been working on the project for years.

Hi there - my name is Becky and I am the Research & Marketing Lady here in Kinshasa with the smallpower peoples. In spite of, and perhaps because of, Kinshasa’s mayhem, I enjoy it very much.

In the run-up to launch, we are putting our Monitoring and Evaluation strategy into place; we’ll obtain both qualitative and quantitive data and use it to establish Behaviour Change indicators which will demonstrate the positive results the serial drama format can bring, specifically within this context and within the DRC.

Initially, our research will centre around qualitative data collection. We have planned to go into schools, meet with police and university students, visit health centres and people in their homes in order to carry out a range of observation and conversational excersises. We hope to see people in a relaxed context, see them watching television, see them talk about television, health, HIV/AIDS, taboos, sexual health and other such issues.

It is promising to be a grueling and exciting first foray into the people of Kinshasa! Will keep you posted.

I’m here too, and looking forward to wrapping up our first three episodes. It’s good to be back in Kinshasa.

I am in Kinshasa, after a break of several months. Its always jarring going from the quiet and isolated life of computers and geekdom in Paris to the highly social, always moving Kinshasa. It takes my soul about a week or so to adjust.

Work over the next two months: finish up the first 3 episodes we shot. Voice over work, pick-up a few shots, and keep editing. I am also getting the engine for production going again. It is a slow process, that will pick up speed faster than I will be able to cope with. Thankfully, our growing team here on the ground is fantastic. We are having dinner and drinks with the cast and crew as a welcome back event on Weds. I will post photos if I get anything good.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m releasing the code for the Flash video player we’re using on the site. I created a page at Google Code where you can check out the code, or just download the compiled .swf and point it at your own video files.

I’ve got a short list of functional and visual improvements I’d like to make, but I’m planning on keeping it very simple. Take a look and let me know if you have any suggestions.

Hello, and welcome to the brand new smallpower.org! We’ll be using this site to talk about our work and to share techniques we learn and tools we create along the way.

To start with, I can tell you that I designed and built this site with TextMate and CSSEdit. I used the Blueprint CSS framework to get the layout looking the way I wanted it, and we’re using ExpressionEngine to manage the content.

The design was influenced by clean, dense sites like Catalogtree, Gelitin, Jennifer Daniel, and UPSO. I like the way those sites show the depth and range of the work being presented without overwhelming or confusing you.

At launch, the site is this single page. As we fill it with more pictures, videos, and words, the site will grow to accommodate with archives, project pages, and author profiles; other standards such as comments are on the slate as well.

I wrote the Flash video player that we’re using, and I’ll be releasing the code under the BSD public license shortly. I’ll have more details about that in my next post. In the meantime, feel free to subscribe to our RSS or Atom feed so you can follow along.