The ODI Communications team aims to enhance the impact of ODI's research on development policy and practice, and ODI’s reputation and image through efficient and effective internal and external communication.

It is doing this through:

• Cross-promotion and increased ‘packaging’ of materials to combine the best thinking from across ODI. An example of this is our strategic engagement around the Development Progress Stories and Millennium Development Report Card, which provide robust and accessible information on national-level progress in different countries and have received worldwide media coverage.
• Live web streaming of ODI events to take them worldwide; viewers are now logging in from across the globe.
• An emphasis on working with major media outlets, with recent articles appearing in The Times, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Observer and The Guardian, and interviews on BBC World, BBC Radio 5 Live, Al Jazeera, CNN, CNBC and more.
• New online communications channels to reach audiences outside of the website. Our Twitter account offers updates on ODI’s online activities, with Twitter users re-posting links to ODI event streams, blogs and media hits; Facebook is lowering the barriers to interaction, with a wider audience can comment on our work.
• Knowledge-sharing activities with researchers worldwide. Since 2009, for example, team members have been in Cairo, Colombo, Lima, Mexico and Nairobi for research communication workshops.

Our 50th anniversary year – running from June 2010 to June 2011 – enabled the Communications team and the Institute as a whole to reflect on ODI’s contribution to development debates since it was created in 1960. Anniversary activities ranged from the production of a timeline of key development milestones – including ODI’s role in them – over the years, to a library of film interviews with development and humanitarian experts, and the digitisation of our back catalogue of publications dating back to the 1960s. We also produced a short animation setting out clearly what ODI does and how, and ended the anniversary year with the first ODI Development Debate, ‘International development: the next 20 years’, chaired by Jon Snow.