The problem
Gram Vikas had over 300 people working across its districts, doing the actual, on-the-ground work of the organisation every single day. Almost none of it was being captured.
It wasn't for lack of good work. It was an operational reality: a small central communications team simply couldn't be everywhere. If a compelling moment happened in a village three districts away, on a day none of us were there, it was gone. We were bottlenecking the organisation's own story by trying to be the only ones who told it.
What we built
Instead of trying to be in more places at once, we decided to stop being the only storytellers. My manager at the time, Jaison Jose, took the idea of decentralising communications and turned it into a formal initiative: training the field teams themselves to document their own work. Our in-house communications team built and piloted the training from there.
We built a training module from scratch, in the local language, covering the fundamentals of storytelling alongside practical photography and videography skills. It wasn't a one-off workshop. We ran it iteratively, training a group in one location, taking their feedback on what didn't land, rebuilding the module, and running it again elsewhere. Over roughly a year and a half, our team trained nearly every field member in the organisation.
What changed
The shift showed up first in small ways: noticeably better photos coming in from district teams who'd never picked up a camera with intent before. Then it grew. Field staff began making their own videos, documenting village life beyond their formal job descriptions, entirely on their own initiative.
Some of it went further than we expected. One colleague, Debaraj, started his own YouTube channel to document community stories. Another, Basant, built a training video, on his own, to teach volunteers rainwater harvesting techniques.
That was the real outcome, not better content metrics, but people who'd never seen themselves as storytellers taking ownership of their own narrative. Years later, seeing Gram Vikas field teams post their own work on LinkedIn is the clearest evidence that it stuck.
Why it still shapes how I work
This project is where I learned that the best communications strategy is sometimes to make yourself unnecessary: to build the capacity for people to tell their own stories rather than telling those stories for them. It's a principle I carried directly into building SBI Foundation's MarCom function, systems and training that outlast any single person doing the work by hand.