Rumour Has It: A Practice Guide to Working with Rumours

This guide is designed for humanitarian organisations working in emergency response situations to enable them to integrate working with rumours into their response programmes. The guide aims to build organisations' knowledge and understanding of rumours, and suggests key steps and and issue to consider when dealing with them. It includes a range of options and tools that can be used in different combinations according to the context, and a ‘good enough’ approach is encouraged: integrate quick and simple steps immediately, and build from these.

As stated in the guide, “[I]n an emergency context rumours can be a matter of life or death. They can create suffering or anger and provoke detrimental behaviour or violent reactions. And yet rumours are often dismissed by humanitarian actors or they simply remain unaware of them and their potential risks until they have to deal with the consequences.” The guide defines a rumour as unverified information that is transmitted from one person to others. There are two sub-groups of rumours, which are defined by the intent of the people spreading them:

• Misinformation is incorrect information spread by people without the intent to deceive, for example through a misunderstanding.
• Disinformation is incorrect information spread by people in order to deceive or manipulate others. An example of this is ‘fake news’, which is disinformation disguised as news, often spread for political or economic gain.

While means and motives may vary, the impact is the same - people are unable to make informed choices about their future, and basing these choices on unverified information can have devastating consequences.

The Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) Network commissioned this practice guide to draw both on their experiences and those of others organisations in order to document approaches, practices, and tools to working with rumours. The guide is illustrated with experiences from a range of contexts (such as conflict situations, epidemics, and environmental disasters), and all of the examples given are based on real rumours.

The guide is structured as follows:

Part One: Why rumours matter - focuses on some of the theory behind rumours: the definition, nature and importance of rumours, and why we need to work with them.

• What is a rumour?

Understanding the nature of rumours

• What are the different types of rumour?
• Why do people share rumours?
• What factors enable rumours?

Why rumours cannot be ignored

Part Two: Working with rumours - explains the key steps and considerations to identifying and addressing rumours: listening, verifying and engaging.

Listening

• Identify how to listen
• Create a rumour logbook
• Decide when to react

Verifying

• Identify reliable information sources
• Find out the facts and triangulate
• Understand the rumour better

Engaging

• Develop a new narrative
• Decide whether to reference the original rumour
• Use the right communication channels
• Check the message is being understood

Part Three: Anticipation, Responsibilities, Coordination and Partnerships - examines different roles and responsibilities in working with rumours, and how coordination and partnerships can enhance what organisations do.

• Anticipation
• Responsibilities
• Coordination
• Partnerships
• Conclusion

The guide ends with two in-depth case study from the work of Internews, a media development organisation, and Search for Common Ground, an organisation focusing on transforming the way people deal with conflict by promoting collaborative solutions to conflict. A list of resources for further information is also included.