What happened when we began co-creating campaigns with local peacebuilders

“When was the last time you seriously thought about support that wasn’t financial?”

This question was posed by our Syrian partner after a year of co-creation with Peace Direct. This captures an ongoing reflection we have been grappling with internally about what genuine partnership should look like. 

Peace Direct has been rethinking how we can be a more equitable partner for years, but our fundraising and communications (F&C) lagged behind. We were telling our partners’ stories for them, while our F&C team was operating independently from the people who made those stories possible. 

The past few years have seen the international development sector wake up to the need to shift power to local peers and decolonise how we work. Yet these changes often focus on programmatic work, with F&C as an afterthought. For too long, Peace Direct was no different. Our team sat at a distance from our partnerships, storytelling became transactional, and we missed opportunities to build something together. This disconnect leads to extractive storytelling and leaves F&C teams struggling to mobilise support without reinforcing the very power dynamics we’re trying to dismantle. 

As Peace Direct committed to decolonise as an organisation, the idea for a co-created global campaign, for and by local peacebuilders, was born. To remain true to the campaign’s intention, Peace Direct could not drive the narrative or agenda. Genuine co-creation was the only way to ensure peacebuilders themselves were centred throughout. The campaign, Peace Starts Here, and our co-creation journey became a practical test for a new decolonised approach to F&C. 

The change 

Co-creation isn’t a fix-all, and no process undoes centuries of inequality overnight. But we found it helped us resist the ingrained pull toward international organisations leading everything and forced us to look honestly at our own habits. 

Our work had followed rigid internal timelines, shaped by our assumptions rather than our partners’ priorities. The Peace Starts Here campaign gave us a reason to change that. By building direct relationships between our F&C team and local peacebuilders, we started to see this work not as a support function but as a genuine space for shared ownership. 

Co-appeals: from transactional to collaborative 

Through co-creation, our yearly fundraising co-appeals have allowed more time to jointly shape not just the campaign message but the process itself. Each co-created fundraising appeal has learned from the last, and as relationships with local partners have deepened, so has the collaboration between our teams. Campaign messages have become richer and more grounded in partner realities and have resonated more strongly with supporters as a result. 

In our most recent co-appeal, our public email engagement rate hit 4.5%, tripling our target. We reached 80% of an ambitious fundraising target and for the first time, and trialled reactive lead-generation ads which attracted 8,000 new individuals to our mailing list. But perhaps more telling than the numbers: having built the campaign message together, our partner trusted us to publish content without back-and-forth approval. That freed them to focus on what mattered most to them; in this case, shadowing our F&C team to build their own public engagement infrastructure. 

Majdi, a programme manager at Child Guardians, one of our peacebuilding partners, described this process as “one of the rare times I saw capacity building done properly – this was a full year of continuous engagement.” 

Content collection: from extractive to integrated  

Co-creation changed how we gather content entirely. Rather than arriving with a brief and a deadline, we now embed content gathering within partners’ existing processes. 

It sounds simple, but the impact is significant: partners share what they choose, on their own terms, rather than responding to requests shaped by our internal timelines. The stories that emerge from this are more contextual, and more honest about what peacebuilding actually looks like.

Embedding content collection within partnerships has also brought our team closer to Peace Direct’s wider work. This year, we are working closely with our Sudanese partner to gather stories of impact that will feed into a co-appeal, donor reporting, advocacy campaigns and internal learning simultaneously.

This is one set of stories, serving multiple purposes, shaped by our partner from the start. 

Storytelling: one story, many audiences 

We used to tell different stories to different audiences. The split created tension, public-facing stories risked white saviour narratives, while sector-facing ones were seen as too complex for general supporters. 

Peace Starts Here showed us that assumption was wrong. The Real Stories of Peace, an online and in-person exhibition, gave local peacebuilders a collective space to share their stories. People from 158 countries visited the online gallery, viewing the stories 32,000 times. When shared on social media, the stories consistently outperformed other content in engagement and reach. 

Authentic, complex stories are compelling regardless of audience. And peacebuilding experiences were not too much for public audiences. Instead, they were exactly what people responded to. We have taken these learnings into our content planning; co-creating narratives and stories with local peacebuilders. 

Closer collaboration and stronger impact 

None of this works without trust, and trust takes time. The shift in how our team works has only been possible because we invested in relationships before we set agendas. Direct collaboration between F&C and partners reduces miscommunication, increases efficiency and makes our work more strategic. It changes the nature of the partnership itself, as partners know their stories will be handled with care. 

As one peacebuilder in the Peace Starts Here movement put it: “Knowing what Peace Starts Here and Peace Direct stand for, we are confident your content will be well curated.” 

If we are serious about change, co-creation must be more than a convenient buzzword. It is not about inviting people in; it is about working alongside those best placed to lead. 

That means treating communications not as an afterthought, but as a core part of how partnerships are built and sustained. For Peace Direct, that shift is still underway. But Peace Starts Here has shown us what becomes possible when you trust the process and the people in it.