What UN agencies often require from communications partners
One of our first ever bookings, 11 years ago, was a pro-bono workshop with a UN agency in the Middle East. Since that day, when colleagues placed their trust in our team, we’ve had the honour of collaborating with UN teams over the intervening years. We thought we’d share some of our learnings by outlining what – in our experience – makes comms partnerships with UN teams work best.
The requirements for technical capacity are exacting: strong strategy, content creation, ideation, and campaign delivery. But beyond this, working with a large international organisation – even if the collaboration is with a specific division or country office – requires familiarity with governance and approval processes, diplomatic considerations, inclusion and equity, donor visibility obligations, multilingual production and the practical constraints of distributed teams.
As communications demand increases across humanitarian response, development programming and international advocacy, we’ve seen UN teams seek external partners who can provide strategic and delivery support without increasing transaction costs. So strong partnerships usually come from suppliers who understand how UN workflows operate in practice.
How this translates into our working approach: Assignments can require several reviews at different levels of seniority. We use a structured clearance workflow: named reviewers, version control, and a single (simple) decision log. This approach has reduced the need for rework, speeding up the final process, and ensures any decisions can later be audited if approvals change across time zones or staff moves.
Recognising that communications inside the UN are operationally complex
UN communications work may involve multiple stakeholder groups. For starters:
- Headquarters communications teams
- Regional and country offices
- Technical programme staff
- Donor representatives
- Government counterparts
- Translators and localisation teams
- Legal, risk or review functions
Even modest outputs can require structured, multi-stage clearance across time zones and departments. A single asset may need review by technical leads, donor focal points and senior management before publication.
In practice, this means suppliers like AMS need to operate effectively when:
- timelines change with programme or political context
- approvals are iterative and documented
- tone must remain neutral and institutionally consistent
- donor visibility requirements are mandatory
- stakeholder management is integral to delivery, not an add-on
AMS example: For a multi-country programme, we created a single messaging pack used by headquarters and field teams, as well as partners. The pack included a narrative, key messages, donor acknowledgement language, and a translation-ready source file as well as social and design assets and guidance. This made implementation more seamless, and prevented conflicting messaging across regions and countries.
UN communications teams may have limited surge capacity
We’ve seen hugely talented comms units within multilateral organisations, managing large portfolios with constrained internal capacity. That comes under pressure particularly during:
- humanitarian emergencies
- high-level summits, conferences and missions
- donor reporting periods
- international observance days
- major advocacy moments
While there might be some levers for more internal support, at these moments it can be helpful to bring in a quick injection of surge capacity from an external supplier. Effective support areas can typically include:
- translating technical material into clear, audience-appropriate messaging
- coordinating multilingual workflows and quality control
- aligning messaging across headquarters and field settings
- drafting executive-level briefs and speaking points
- supporting stakeholder engagement processes
- ensuring visibility compliance against donor requirements
- maintaining consistency across multiple workstreams
AMS delivery insight: Where teams are stretched, bottlenecks often come from “late-stage rewrite” where a senior leader disagrees with the product’s direction, requires a rewrite at the last moment. We reduce the risk of this by agreeing tone and evidence thresholds early, ensuring senior stakeholders are engaged, then drafting in modular components. This also supports faster sign-off if approvers are engaged later in the process.
Tone and risk awareness are central
UN communications frequently require careful balance between:
- institutional neutrality
- political sensitivity and context
- evidence-based messaging
- human-centred storytelling with safeguarding considerations
- inclusive language and imagery that ensures all genders, identities and abilities are represented with dignity and respect
- donor priorities and agreed acknowledgement language
- consensus wording across partners and Member State audiences
Approaches that work in NGO campaigning or commercial contexts may not translate directly. Small wording choices can change perceived intent, attribution or political framing. So suppliers like us need to make sure our drafting is disciplined, our version control is impeccable, and that we are ready to adapt to production requirements as we go.
Visibility and donor communications are contractual requirements
Many communications outputs are tied to donor agreements and reporting obligations – just as in the nonprofit sector more widely. Common requirements include:
- logo placement and brand guidance compliance
- agreed acknowledgement language
- publication approvals and records of clearance
- visibility metrics and reporting formats
- partner references and attribution protocols
- social media tagging requirements
- event branding and signage standards
- multilingual dissemination plans
This work requires creativity to be combined with operational discipline – gorgeous work, no mistakes.
AMS working approach: We treat visibility as part of production, not something we add at the end. We maintain an approvals checklist that includes donor language, partner references, and required logos, then confirm compliance before final export. We care about making partner visibility look and feel as good as the campaign content we produce, knowing that donors, supporters and advocates are important in continuing mission-driven work at all levels.
What UN agencies may value in suppliers
With over a decade of engaging in procurement processes we feel confident saying that in procurement terms, high-performing communications suppliers usually demonstrate:
- understanding of multi-layer review workflows and clearance constraints
- reliable delivery under changing timelines
- strong drafting and content creation for technical, executive and public audiences, and familiarity with the types of audiences being targeted
- structured project management and version control with reliable audit trails and minimal operational friction
- multilingual production and coordination across teams, regions and time zones
- discretion, professionalism and safeguarding compliance
- ability to integrate with existing systems and reduce coordination load.
AMS example from a previous project: Preparing for the campaign launch for a major international organisation at a world event, we ran a daily 20-minute meeting for all staff across communications functions. Information was shared quickly and transparently. We maintain a single tracker for actions, risks and approvals on our major projects. These tools helped keep delivery on schedule.
Supplier capability statement
AMS supports public interest organisations, including international agencies and NGOs, with strategic communications and delivery support. Typical services include communications planning, messaging and editorial support, multilingual content workflows, executive briefs and speeches, campaign and publication production, stakeholder engagement materials and donor visibility deliverables.
If you are assessing supplier fit, we can share relevant examples, delivery approaches and resourcing structures aligned to UN review and clearance processes. Please get in touch or arrange an introductory call at your convenience.
