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- Critical challenges for communication professionals in NGOs for development in PortugalPublication . Neto, César Humberto Pimentel; Eiró-Gomes, Mafalda; Silvestre, CláudiaA lot has been said, and written, about the non-governmental organisations, their work, their lack or not of independence from public (governmental or supra-govenmental) funding but in what concerns Portugal, almost anything has been done to understand how they use their resources (from a communicative point of view) to improve their work, to raise funds, to manage to employ the best technicians available or to improve the employee engagement. Moreover, we seldom hear to speak about communication or public relations in these organisations when we are focused on theirs projects or programmes eventhough in cases were the main concern of these projects is to change unwanted behaviours or preventing undesirable outcomes, may they be in health or gender issues, or, for instances, in programmes developped to improve financial literacy or fighting poverty. “Communication” seems to be seen only as a discoursive function, to be added to an institutional programme if there’s money or time left. It is not by hasard that we’ve enlightened two of the main concerns for the communication professionals in these kind of organisations: the work in what is in general considered institutional communication and the work in communication in the public interest, or according to other authors, communication for the behavioural and social change. In reality a lot of work is done, specially abroad, but also in Portugal in the are of communication for development but it is not, at all, aknowledged as communication. In general these kind of programmes are proposed and developped by someone from a specific area of knowledge such as economy, sociology or international relations and never from a team where the communication professional might have a main role. This paper adresses the second phase of an ongoing project that involves mixed methods analysis and that has as its main purpose to understand the role of the communication professionals in the NGOs for development in Portugal. The specific research question that this paper will be addressing may be summarised as an interrogation about the role that the communication professionals are called to fulfill in these intitutions. Do the communication professionals have operational and strategic responsabilities in the portuguese NGO for development? Under the umbrella concept of strategic responsabilities we’ve considered aspects as the definition of the communication priorities in a stategic and planned way, the management of the institutions reputation or the capacity to determine the style and the tone throughout the organisation. Questions as the existence of a media relations plan or a risk and crisis communication plan where also adressed. Under the idea of a more operational approach we’ve considered aspects that have to do with events and actions that are dealt in a merely responsive or casuistical way. In order to produce the data, semi-structured interviews were conducted in all the NGO respondents by two researchers, and the data recollected analised with the help of a qualitative text / content analysis software, NVivo. The study that will be presented here highlihts the lack of a consistent work in the communication area as well as the total absence of any kind of a strategic thinking. The communication professionals seem to be seen only as performing operational tasks that do not belong to the realm of the strategic thinking of these organisations.