Who should use this Communication Strategy?

It is designed to be useful to multiple audiences, including staff from ministries of health, non-governmental organizations (NGO) and community-based organizations. The Strategy can support the efforts of communication professionals working directly on behavior change communication programs as well as other professionals working in reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH) who need to create a demand generation component to support program activities.

How to Use this Communication Strategy?

This Strategy forms part of a comprehensive Demand Generation Implementation Kit for Underutilized Commodities in RMNCH. The Implementation Kit (“I-Kit”) includes commodity-specific communication strategies designed to be easily adapted across multiple country contexts and integrated into existing RMNCH plans. The I-Kit also includes resources on three core cross-cutting demand generation areas: addressing the role of gender; utilizing information and communication technologies (ICTs) and new media; and leveraging public-private partnerships (PPPs).

This Strategy is not intended to serve as a “one-size-fits-all” model. It is designed as a quick-start foundation based on available evidence to provide guidance in answering the following questions:

• Where are we now?
• What is our vision?
• How are we going to achieve our vision?
• How do we know we achieved our vision?

Ideally, country-level teams would then integrate commodity-specific content tailored to the country context into existing or new RMNCH communication strategies for demand generation.

It is important to note that the strategy focuses on communication – typically the product promotion component of a social marketing approach. If desired, the strategy can be integrated and expanded into a broader social marketing framework, addressing product, price and place.