Abstract

Communicating statistics is a fundamental and legitimate responsibility as part of the transparency and accountability.

The overall goal of the communication strategy of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) is to enhance public interaction with PCBS website and social accounts. Moreover, it serves the objectives towards ensuring the delivery of statistical data and indicators to a wide range of the public, and relying on them as a national and official reference in the various publications and reports issued by national, civil and media institutions.

Main beneficiaries of the communication strategy are: Researchers, journalists, social media influencers, official and government ministries and institutions, private and civil institutions, educational and university institutions, planners and decision makers, in addition to the public in general.

Several innovation activities were conducted by PCBS to abide by the concept of "leaving no one behind" including:

- PCBS website is disability-friendly; a special event was organized on the International Day of persons with Disabilities and all video materials are sign language adapted.

- To communicate gender gap statistics, a theatrical play was created and performed to the public audienve with a focus on the youth (young men and women), where the play was replayed over 30 times in one year at all local universities and local theaters.

- Keeping up with hot topics, where a household survey was concucted to measure the impact of COVID-19 pandamic on the Palestinian households, socio-economic conditions and its results were disseminated through COVID-19 monitoring dashboard on PCBS website.

- Due to the importance of updating the SDGs indicators and making them available to the public, PCBS developed a special dashboard for SDGs monitoring on its website that can be accessed easily by all the users.

- Within the framework of the efforts made to follow up and monitor the implementation of the cluster development plans launched by the government, an electronic platform for a cluster development atlas for the governorates in various fields was developed. It includes interactive maps for a set of indicators for each governorate and at the locality level in a concise, easy and clear manner. In addition to designing an automated, chat application (ChatBot) that responds to users' questions when requesting some statistical data and indicators. The application is installed on PCBS website and Facebook.

- PCBS created a school competition initiative, which is an opportunity for students to learn about the most important results and figures, produced by PCBS and the importance of data in general. It also acts as an exercise in using statistical data in their research. The competition aims to promote the awareness of official statistics among school students by encouraging them to explore statistics produced by PCBS through using statistics in their daily lives and to advance the essential analytical skills for them to become familiar with data organization, visualization, and critical thinking.