Alex Yates
Creative Director
Kiet Hoang
Account Manager
Manh Nguyen
Videographer
Hien Trang
Copywriter
Tuan Anh Nguyen
Graphic Designer
Background
Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is an umbrella program managed by GiZ, the German international development agency. Spanning countries and approaches, TVET comprises numerous projects and implementing partners, all working to build private sector capacity across Southeast Asia. This can take the form of helping HR offices implement training and professional development schemes, offering technical courses in renewable energy to civil engineers in rural areas, or even soft skills workshops for office workers.
Given the complexity of the program, and the broad range of implementing partners that GiZ was engaging for TVET component projects, they needed support to develop coherent and localized branding and messaging. Having already worked with Fourdozen on their messaging to the Green Tech Incubator, GiZ turned to us once again to bring our work for them overseas. What a privilege it was to again be in service of this organization, and to get to do work so entirely aligned with our values.
Our Approach
A project with numerous audiences and goals will need numerous, custom fit solutions. So in order to support TVET, Fourdozen convened our most diverse creative team to date. Our first step was to dive in at the deep end of the pool with a video project. Fourdozen’s Creative Director and videographer traveled to Cambodia to attend the 2022 ASEAN Business Awards, a part of the 40th and 41st ASEAN Summit. There, we embedded ourselves with an international team of private sector awardees from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia—all of them recipients of capacity development from TVET. Over the course of two days we conducted in depth interviews with these awardees, learning firsthand about their experience with the program, while also covering the event itself for GiZ.
After returning to Hanoi, it was time to put this newfound understanding to the test. The next phase of our engagement with TVET was to work directly with three implementation teams—two in Indonesia, and one in Cambodia—to create branding, slogans, key messages and training materials that would suit their local context. Each of these teams was composed both of GiZ officials and implementing partner staff, and each of them were delivering a different product, to a different audience. Based on all that we had learned, Fourdozen embarked on three concurrent branding and messaging projects, defining key audience personas and workshopping with our counterparts to create visuals and slogans that would resonate.
As we’ve learned for other technically complex projects in the donor and NGO communities, there is no substitute to getting out into the field. We’re grateful to GiZ for allowing us to do this in support of TVET, and for trusting us on a project so central to their development portfolio.