Manual for Designing Communication for Vaccination Campaigns in Kazakhstan

"Increasing healthy behaviours and creating a supportive social environment for behaviour change requires stimulating an appetite for learning and participation through regular dialogue....This type of behaviour change communication and social mobilisation works when actions, messages and materials are strategically planned, managed, monitored with participation of communities, and supported by adequate financial and human resources."

Prepared with the support of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Country Office in Kazakhstan, this step-by-step guide for implementing communication campaigns for vaccination describes all stages of communication strategy design - from developing key messages and identifying potential communication barriers to communicating with media and various stages of crisis communication. The guide can be also used for planning and implementation of public outreach strategies on broader health issues.

While the guide may be helpful for professionals in communications departments and press services of the healthcare sector, the common notion that communication equals holding a press conference or having a plan for when messages on vaccinations should be released is quickly dispensed with here. Rather, a communication strategy for immunisation in this manual is defined as a strategy that focuses on reaching the intended populations with vaccines through two-way communication using a mix of communication tools, channels, and approaches to facilitate dialogue, participation, and engagement with children, families, communities, and various networks for positive social and behaviour change. In addition to these core communication for development (C4D) - sometimes also referred to as social and behaviour change communication (SBCC) - tenets, the manual focuses on social mobilisation, which is based on evidences that community ownership, involvement, and leadership results in greater impact of communication.

The guide is grounded in the social-ecological model, which is a theory-based framework for understanding the multifaceted and interactive effects of personal and environmental factors that determine behaviours and for identifying behavioural and organisational leverage points and intermediaries for SBC within organisations.

Following an introduction, the guide includes these main parts:

1. The basics of a good communication strategy
2. Team set up - Engaging stakeholders and partners
3. Setting specific behavioural goals - What do we want to do and how do we state it?
4. Audience analysis - Who are we communicating to and why is it important?
5. Designing, testing, and delivering the message
6. Media and social media
7. Monitoring & evaluation
8. Budgeting
9. Crises and emergency communication
10. COVID-19 and communication