Building with God: Working with the Blueprint

This is the second part of a four-part series where I am documenting the journey and lessons learnt from building The Comms Avenue vision with God. You can read the first part here. 

Sometimes, I try to put myself in Noah’s shoes. Being instructed to build an ark when the world had never been flooded before – did he wonder about what God had asked him to build? Did he even understand the weight of what God was about to do? What will flooding the entire earth be like? For how long? How would he and his family survive in the ark for an uncertain amount of time? I don’t know if Noah asked any of these questions but I do wonder.

When God gives you a vision or instruction, you must be patient enough to get the ‘how’ from Him. If you run off with your own idea of the how, it will eventually end in tears. Ok, maybe that’s being a bit dramatic but I hope you get the point.

For me, when God started to speak about The Comms Avenue, I recieved instructions per time. When I was clear on what the community was meant to look like, I started to ask how we’d engage and publicise the community. This was how we created our launch and engagement strategy and one of the first things we needed to do was to have a learning session with a global senior Communications professional.

Where was I going to find this person? I had to trust that God would align everything as I sent LinkedIn DMs to a long list of senior professionals. Trust me, it was really long. Some said no, others didn’t respond but one person said yes. And that was all we needed – one yes.

With that yes, we kicked off a weekly learning session in the Telegram group that featured professionals from leading global organisations. We called it a Chat with a Comms Professional. For something that was new at the time, this was a big win for us. But we couldn’t rest there. God started to prompt us to respond to the needs we could identify from the conversations happening within the community.

It was clear that we needed to have more robust conversations around the pressing needs and challenges faced by African Communications professionals. That was how our TCA Webinar Series began and in July, we decided to have a themed weekly conversation which featured six global professionals. How we got them, how they said yes, it was all God. We also pitched the series to BusinessDay and we had them on board as a media partner. Another win for us.

At this point, we had started to work on our visual identity and structure. We kicked off with a placeholder logo designed with Canva but by July, we had developed a comprehensive brand identity. Thank you, Kachi! Let me just say here that we had to figure things out as we went along. We also didn’t have a pile of cash at our disposal. So there was a lot of bootstrapping with a sprinkle of tears and frustration here and there…on my part that is.

Just as we were getting comfortable with the success of the learning series and webinars, Abba began to nudge my heart again. We had seen that there was a mentorship gap in the industry and He wanted us to do something about it. What did I know about designing and implementing a mentorship programme? Abba, showed me! The blueprint became the framework our Comms Mentoring Programme (CMP) was built on. I had the blueprint, and I knew this was something that would make a big impact but getting the buy in for the first batch was where the real work was.

We wrote to so many professionals telling them about what it is we were trying to do and thankfully, we had six senior professionals who told us yes. That was all we needed. With the six professionals and eight mentees, we kicked off the first batch of the CMP in August 2020. Execution wasn’t perfect but God helped us and the testimonials that came out of the programme blew our minds away. Four years and six batches later, that framework has helped us to transform the career journeys of young African Comms professionals.

And so we continued with our regular programming until God started to talk about travelling across the continent to bring Comms professionals together. This happened in 2021. This really stretched my faith because TCA did not have any money and personally I was broke broke. The double emphasis is intentional!

I learnt to walk on water as God began to download what this ‘going across the continent’ would look like. I remember our first trip outside of Nigeria in 2022. We had planned to go at the end of 2021 and we thought it would be good to write to organisations and ask for support. As wrote and we sent proposals, the ‘no’s’ kept coming in full force. I felt defeated at some point so we decided to push it to 2022. Ah, 2022…the year my faith has been tested the most! We did go to Ghana but it was all by faith. Same with Rwanda. And Kenya.

Through the deep waters and the stretching moments, God was in all of it. As we pushed and believed God, we saw our footprint of impact growing. By 2022, we had over 1000 members from 15 African countries in our Telegram community. We were very clear from the beginning that we weren’t pursuing numbers but impact. So with every impact project we received from God and executed, we saw growth and even more impact. A lot of times, it was far beyond what we anticipated.

People often ask me the strategies we used to build The Comms Avenue community and brand. The truth is that we simply built with God and we continue to do so. We move as He leads. Sometimes, the outcome doesn’t turn out as expected but we trust that since God is leading us, everything will work together for good.

Also, our benchmark for success isn’t based on the usual metrics. For us, it’s always, are we doing what God wants us to do? Are we where He wants us to be? Are we walking in obedience and following the blueprint He has given to us per time? That is what matters to us and that has also helped us to implement a collaborative approach to our work which has been beneficial to our community members.

So, what lessons can I leave with you?

• Be prepared to be stretched when you want to build with God. The stretching will grow your faith if you don’t give up.
• Building with God isn’t about the money in your account. You must be able to walk with water and trust that God will provide. He always does but usually not in the way we expect or imagine.
• You must have a heart for the people. While what you are building may bring you to the limelight, you must never lose sight of God’s why or allow your motive to become tainted.
• Be patient. God’s ways are not our ways. Sometimes, things will happen with great speeed. Other times, things will seem to drag and you’ll even feel like God is being deliberately silent. When you feel this way, remember that God loves you and He always has a plan. Always!

See you tomorrow for part three 🙂