Principles for Success
Establish a Core Design Team with Clear Roles
Before anything else, you need a diverse core team of communications, creative, programmatic, and technical experts to develop your campaign. Team members must be ready to dedicate time and attention as needed. The key roles are described below. One person may play more than one role, or one role may have more than one person assigned. Note that too many people can make it difficult to work as a cohesive team, whereas too few people can cause the team to become overwhelmed. The key roles are as follows:
- Lead facilitator to manage the entire process from start to finish and ensure tasks are completed. This person acts as facilitator for the various workshops and thus should be able to think quickly and effectively resolve conflicts. This person also should be an SBC expert as they are responsible for ensuring the campaign aligns with best practices. Skills and experience in design or human-centered design would be especially beneficial.
- External liaison to manage relationships and input from external stakeholders, government staff, and implementing partners and ensure they are meaningfully involved throughout campaign development. Ideally, this person has established relationships with stakeholders outside of the campaign.
- Health or technical area expert to ensure technical areas are covered adequately and accurately and that the campaign aligns to standards and guidelines within the technical area and program objectives. For example, for a malaria campaign, this person should have expertise in WHO and national guidelines related to testing and treatment.
- Communications point person to work with creative partners, such as script writers, agencies, and studios, to translate ideas into reality while ensuring the original intent and vision of the concepts are preserved and achieved.
Set your SBC Mass Media Campaign Up for Success
Include critical external stakeholders from the start
Collaborating with the government and other implementing partners helps ensure the development and dissemination of a consistent, nationwide SBC campaign. This coordinated effort can leverage partner resources and secure national support based on SBC best practices. Likewise, engaging all stakeholders, including donors, is essential throughout the process to ensure a successful campaign that aligns with their priorities and interests.
Be ready for anything!
Be flexible and nimble, especially when addressing unexpected dynamics and co-creating a campaign with a wide range of stakeholders. Stay focused on the objective and guide the group’s momentum in that direction while allowing them space to be creative and think of new ideas.
Have a plan to guide you
Most SBC campaigns are a work plan deliverable with a deadline for the campaign to launch. Many individual steps are needed to develop and produce a mass media campaign, so even if the deadline seems far in the future, time can quickly slip away. Have a plan like a Gantt chart that clearly lays out each step and its duration to help meet all project deadlines.
Campaign Development Gantt Chart
Suggested time:
4 hours
Participants:
Core design team
Tool: SBC Mass Media Campaign Development Gantt Chart
The SBC mass media campaign development Gantt chart outlines the general steps for developing an SBC mass media campaign. However, no two campaigns are ever the same, so this tool is designed to allow flexibility in skipping steps, adjusting the duration of and spacing between tasks, getting appropriate approvals, establishing contracts, and handling other commitments. The timelines can be customized to your campaign, and you may drop and shorten activities as needed. Ideally, those decisions should be rooted in an understanding of the objectives behind the activity, so activities critical to the success of your campaign are not inadvertently dropped.
Effort required:
Agenda Planning Template
Suggested time:
4 hours
Participants:
Core design team
Tool: Agenda Planning Template
Use the agenda planning template to schedule and create agendas for the various workshops throughout the campaign development process. The template makes it easy to change session starting times, durations, and order without having to manually retype certain details. Any text in a yellow cell can be changed to suit your needs.
Effort required:
Listen to Your Intended Audience
Several key steps in this toolkit require learning from your intended audience. Do not skip this important task. The more you invest in learning from your audience, the better informed your campaign will be. Some design teams may opt for a process of full co-creation, where members of the intended audience participate throughout the design process, including generating ideas for the campaign and developing various iterations of the materials. At a minimum, you should engage your audience at three critical points to ensure a successful campaign:
- In the very beginning when you are gathering insights about your audience and behaviors of interest. This knowledge will help set the direction of your campaign.
- When you are testing your creative concepts to see which idea resonates best with your audience. This knowledge will confirm if you are going in the right direction.
- When you are pretesting draft campaign materials with your audience. This information will let you know if you are reaching your objective.
Stick to Your Creative Brief
The creative process can take you in many unexpected directions. Do not lose sight of the campaign objectives specified in your creative brief. For a facilitator, the creative brief is an essential tool for evaluating creative ideas. Be careful not to stifle creativity in the earlier stages. Examine ideas as they arise against the creative brief to ensure the campaign meets its SBC objectives.
