ORINFOR urged to conduct audience survey

The government owned media outlet, ORINFOR, has been called upon to establish the needs of the audience it serves by conducting an audience survey. The call was made by the Director General in the Ministry of Information, Ignatius Kabagambe, during a meeting to validate the organisation’s five-year business and strategic plan. “It is an immediate priority for ORINFOR to conduct an audience survey to know the needs of the audience and package their content accordingly,” Kabagambe said.He urged the ORINFOR staff to put discipline and commitment first, if the plan is to be realized. The Strategic Plan was developed with the support from the Public Sector Capacity Building Secretariat (PSCBS), under the auspices of the World Bank. It is envisaged that the Plan will provide ORINFOR with a framework to becoming financially sustainable and competitive in the region. The Acting Director General of ORINFOR, Willy Rukundo, highlighted the need for the institution to change its way of conducting business. “ORINFOR needs to be at the forefront, more interactive with its audiences, and with enhanced capacity to produce quality information through multi-media channels,” he reiterated. During the meeting, some participants highlighted the need to change the name of the institution from ORINFOR to Rwanda Broadcasting Network (RBN) as one way of re-branding the institution. Some of the new initiatives that ORINFOR could embark on to generate more revenue, according to participants, would be through advertising, more newspaper sales in the region, transmitter rental, commercial printing, production of local programmes, charging of nominal fees to access TV online and equipment hire. In a related development, Rukundo said that Rwanda Television was now being accessed on the Internet worldwide. He reported that although the project had started in mid February, about 80,000 people have already visited the website. He was optimistic that this new initiative would promote ORINFOR’s efforts to embrace modern technologies. ORINFOR oversees Radio Rwanda, Rwanda Television and two newspapers - Imvaho Nshya and La Nouvelle Releve. Ends

National

ORINFOR urged to conduct audience survey