Site visits are an important element of the BHP Foundation's partnering approach, providing insights and relationship building opportunities. With travel being restricted during the pandemic, an alternative approach to annual site visits with partners was trialled and tested.

Video - Peru Virtual Site Tour

Site visits are an important element of the BHP Foundation's partnering approach, providing insights and relationship building opportunities. With travel being restricted during the pandemic, an alternative approach to annual site visits with partners was trialled and tested.

Pre-visit connections

The virtual site visit was carried out with Conservation International’s (CI) Alto Mayo Project in Peru, a project in the Environmental Resilience Program.

To kick things off, BHP Foundation shared their reflections of the Project with CI. The purpose of this first step was to re-bridge the connection with our partner across the time since we had last met in person. We aimed to let CI know how valuable we think their work is, and to reinforce that we’re alongside them in their journey, understanding the achievements and ready to hear about challenges.

Here’s how:

• An 8 minute video was compiled from snippets from a recorded one-hour WebEx meeting comprising Foundation and advisory members from EcoAdvisors (Eddie) and Pollination Foundation (Ari).
• Video editing was completed by Dee in Canva (free online editing tool (created login online).
• The video was done in ‘chapters’, starting with brief introductions from Mel, James, Eddie and Ari, then some short descriptions in their own words of the Project and what it means to them, followed by celebrating the Project’s achievements and finishing on what they are excited about for the future of the Project. With a thank you farewell sign off to informally conclude the video.
• 5 minute video (Alto Mayo draft annual report – Dee’s blog style video) was recorded via an iPhone of Dearne’s reflections after reading the Alto Mayo annual report to provide a new starter perspective.
• Both videos were sent to the CI-Peru Alto Mayo Project team to disseminate prior to the workshop.
• The CI team requested the videos to be subtitled and captioned in Spanish for their local partners. 2M translation services (supplier) were able to apply to the video edits within a week.

Virtual site visit to share on-ground perspectives

The CI-Peru team hosted two video conferencing meeting sessions on separate days, 2 hours for each session both with round table presentations. The topics were split to mirror a common site visit format, first hearing from as many people on the ground as possible, followed by a more targeted chat with the Project team.

Session 1 – ‘Site Visit’

• Why – direct contact with local partners removes the filters between front-line staff and the Foundation for transparent two-way conversations to occur.
• Who – CI-Peru core Project team, plus locally-based CI staff and local delivery partners (sub-grantees)
• What – a welcome from CI and participant introductions and then a round table of presentations from local sub- grantees of the overall Project and year in review
• How – sub-grantees shared pre-recorded videos and presentation slides (visual content) from their local teams capturing work complete and progress made over the year. This gave a sense of the on ground day-to-day work of the Project. It concluded with a Q+A between all participants. Link to partner content English OR Spanish.
• Where – held over Zoom video conferencing, with attendees dialling in from Australia, the US and Peru.
• When –28th September 2021, 2 hour workshop.

Session 2 – ‘Annual Report Meeting’

• Who – round table and presentations from regional staff and local partners, followed by the CI team discussion with BHPF on KPI’s, project delivery and budget.
• What – round table and presentations from staff highlighting lessons and challenges of FY21. An overview of priorities and KPIs for FY22 and implications for project delivery (e.g. potential project extension) and corresponding budget. A Q+A session concluded with feedback and commentary on what was presented to shape the year ahead.
• How – pre-recorded videos from community partners were shared; these local voices were felt deeply by attendees. Presentations were simultaneously translated for all attendees.
• Where – held over Zoom video conferencing, with attendees dialling in from Australia, US and Peru.
• When –1st October 2021, 2 hour workshop.

Post visit engagement

The annual site visit was conducted via Zoom and was recorded. The purpose of this capture was to be able to share the in-depth look into the Project with those who weren’t able to attend the session. In particular, the BHP Foundation staff who are involved in supporting the Project in the work they do but aren’t always in close contact with partners.

• Snippets were taken of key discussion points including some of the visual content shared from partners.
• The plan will be to catalogue the visual assets as well as the lessons learned to maximise learnings for other Programs and Partners.
• This is also captured for the Environmental Resilience Knowledge Network to share these learnings with all partners in the program (see video abov.

Lessons

Inclusion – the purpose of building connections needs good communications. We engaged a translator to join the Zoom meetings to provide simultaneous translation services. This contributed to the success of the virtual site visit allowing conversation to flow freely between all attendees. Room for improvement in the choice of translator – next time we’ll seek to find one that’s familiar with the topic being discussed (conservation / community) and familiar with the national dialect.

• Capture the site visit with a summary video made from the VC meeting content. This can be quite straightforward with some pre-planning. We used:
• visual – choose a moment in the VC meeting to ask everyone to turn their cameras on in gallery view – this footage can be used later as a good record of who was there and provides good ‘stills’.
• visual – consider ‘pinning’ the main speaker who is talking for a better view in playback
• If having simultaneous translation have live text captions and record the simultaneous translation and captions
• Prepare a draft storyboard for what the video could look like prior to the meeting to make the video production efficient
• Editing of film
• Footage from the field is useful B-roll for a video
• A narrated script can tie the video together