Designing Communication Strategies that Work: Implementing the SIM Process

"These guidelines are meant to provide health communication experts with direction in developing a communication strategy for their projects."

This guide introduces an approach to developing health communication strategies through a SIM process - which is short for strategy development, intervention redesign, and monitoring and evaluation (M&E). It represents an attempt to systematise the convergence of 3 concurrent and interlinked strands of activity in the start-up phase of PATH communication for social change (CSC) projects. The SIM process resulted from learning from more than a decade of communication programming in the Kenya Country Program, refined and augmented through consultations with communications professionals in other PATH projects worldwide.

"This document proposes a nuanced and formal definition of strategy as a logical approach derived from a deep understanding of local culture and conditions. Similarly, while redesigning interventions to make them relevant to project needs and communities has been a part of project start-up, it has often not been listed explicitly as a step. Also missing have been the steps by which a intervention can be made responsive to the communication strategy on the one hand, and monitoring and evaluation on the other. The SIM process proposes a way to systematically customize intervention templates so that they are strategic and uniquely relevant to the project context. The SIM process' most challenging...recommendation concerns weaving the M&E design together with the processes of communication strategy development and intervention redesign. This elevates M&E to a more central and pivotal position within project design, but also calls for significant paradigm shifts in collaboration between PATH professionals from different disciplines."

The contents include:

1. "Designing the communication strategy
   • Review the literature
   • Conduct formative research
   • Develop a communication strategy draft
   • Review design of proposed interventions
   • Finalize the communication strategy
2. Redesigning the interventions
   • Understand the intervention
   • Adapt the intervention
   • Justify the new intervention design
3. Monitoring and evaluating the project
   • Understand the project
   • Identify and assess the project theory
   • Design a conceptual model
   • Define objectives and research questions
   • Select evaluation type and design
   • Develop indicators
   • Define study populations
   • Select data collection methods
   • Build an MIS system [management information system]
   • Develop an analysis plan
   • Pilot M&E activities and pretest tools
   • Conduct routine monitoring activities
   • Disseminate findings

Appendix 1: Conducting a Stakeholder Workshop
Appendix 2: Conducting a Communication Strategy Workshop
Appendix 3: Measurement frameworks useful for CSC interventions
Appendix 4: Additional References"

Text boxes are provided throughout with concrete advice along the lines of all 3 arms of SIM, such as this example of a strategic guideline within a communication strategy document: "Open and unrestricted communication between men, women, and youth within families should be used create new avenues for identifying health risks and problems, and seeking solutions cooperatively. Supporting evidence: Research demonstrates that partitions exist within families and govern what may be said, to whom, when, and why. Many of these constraints are developed from sociocultural issues and gender dynamics, and they become perceived roles of different family members. Often interventions target these groups individually, thereby inherently increasing the barriers they are trying to eliminate. Improving the quality of communication between members of a family may strategically affect how they identify, share, and address issues of health, and incite new levels of trust and confidence in each other. Recommendation: Engage entire families in facilitated discussion groups to open up new communication channels and to begin identifying problems, predicaments, barriers, and information gaps as well as to collaborate on solutions."