What Six Sessions of Water Communications Training Taught Me About Telling the Truth

I almost didn't sign up for this year's SIWI Water in Communications 2026 training.

Not because I wasn't interested, but because I told myself I already knew enough to keep going. I had a community to build. A newsletter to launch. Did I really need a training programme?

Then I read the theme: Communicating Water for Collective Action. And I thought, yes, actually. I do.

I went in with one honest question, which I typed into the chat on day one. It was that I am really hoping to learn more about how to shift from reactive communications to proactive communications in the water sector. I didn't know if I would find the answer. But I wanted to be in the room with people asking similar things.

What I found in the first session was a Zoom room with nearly 150+ people from across the world. From Yemen and Vietnam, Botswana and Bolivia, Bangladesh and Brazil and right here in Toronto. All of us, in different time zones, with different water crises, trying to figure out how to make this story land.

Six sessions later, here's what stayed.

People before the project

This was probably the most repeated idea across the series, and it cuts right through how most water communications is still produced. Communities appear as data points and before-and-after photographs, rather than people with agency over how their own stories are told. The breakout exercises made it visceral. Participants developed headline angles for the same water intervention, and what came back was remarkable. Headlines anchored in one person whose life had changed. Stories named after specific rivers being fought for. Framings that shifted from pity to capability. That's what people-centred storytelling sounds like when it's actually practiced.

The 3Rs I carry everywhere

Somewhere in the sessions I shared a framework I had been developing quietly: Real, Relatable, Repeatable.

• Real: because the most powerful water stories are grounded in something true.

• Relatable: because data doesn't move people, connection does.

• Repeatable: because a story that can only be told once, by one person, is an anecdote.

The stories that change things are the ones people carry and pass on. Saying it in a room of 150+ practitioners made it sharper.

The fear debate

Session two sparked the most energetic conversation of the series. One camp argued that negative emotions make people scroll, not act and that the opportunity lies in reconnection, not catastrophe.

The other said anger is a powerful trigger, especially on social media. What struck me most was a quieter point: spending years reading about environmental disasters can leave communicators numb to them. Flooding people with information doesn't always activate them. Sometimes it anaesthetises them.

And that applies to us too, not just our audiences. There's no single emotional lever. What matters is whether the emotion leads somewhere and whether it gives people something to do with what they are feeling.

A framework I'll use forever

HELCH. Humanity. Emotion. Local Voice. Credibility. Hope and Action.

It's not a formula, it's a checklist. Does this story have a real person in it? Does it make you feel something? Does it include someone who actually lives with this issue? Can you trust it? Does it leave you with somewhere to go? The stories that have all five are the ones that stay with you.

False balance and why it matters

Session six was where I had my most uncomfortable moment. Samuel Ajala named something I had been doing without realising. He called it false balance: giving equal airtime to unequal positions.

Picture a news segment where one expert sits opposite a denier. Equal chairs, equal time. It looks fair. But if the evidence overwhelmingly supports one side, that framing misleads the audience. It tells them the debate is open when it isn't.

In water communications (specially as non-profits), we do this constantly because we want to be inclusive. But being fair to people is not the same as being fair to every claim. When confusion has a real cost, in policy, in public trust, in lives, calling it fairness is a form of harm.

Call to action

The final two sessions happen this week. One on water inequalities and the other contextualizing what comes next for water communicators. You can still register for them here: https://siwi.zoom.us/meeting/register/ie4HfBJwS2iNiHfnr-OC_g#/registration

If you are interested in watching this year's recordings, you can find them here: https://www.youtube.com/@worldwaterweek4015/videos