From Strategy to Creative Concepts and Materials
From Strategy to Creative Concepts and Materials
Once you have achieved consensus on the SBCC strategy, your project will develop and test creative concepts, then turn these concepts into executions (i.e., samples) to test with your target audience. While this process is similar to that for vertical programs, certain aspects require particular emphasis or nuance in integrated programming. This section will focus on those aspects.
Developing Creative Concepts
A creative concept is an overarching “big idea” or unifying theme that can be used across all campaign messages, calls to action, communication channels and audiences. Developing and testing creative concepts is particularly important for integrated SBCC campaigns that need to ensure the entire campaign is coherent across multiple topics, and resonates with all audiences. Find more information on how to develop creative concepts here.
- Consider how you will develop your creative concepts. Through an internal creative team? With an advertising agency? Together with audiences through a human-centered design approach or in an Action Media workshop? If you decide to use an advertising agency, human-centered design firm or other outside organization, consider the pros and cons to having a single agency or multiple firms. Would a single firm be able to handle the workload? How might dividing the work impact uniformity?
- Develop a wide range of concepts. This will increase the chances of finding one that deeply resonates with your target audience. Consider basing your concepts around values, benefits, emotions, trends, cultural phenomena, symbols or other broad constructs that will encapsulate your integrated SBCC program’s components.
- Be sure that your creative concept is flexible. Will it be able to accommodate other topics or behaviors that you might be asked to include at a later point in time?
- Try developing a few sample executions for your different topics for each creative concept to see if and how they work for different content areas.
- Remember that your creative concept is not meant to be a final, polished product, just a rough mock-up or prototype that conveys the overarching creative link. This might be a concept board with a headline, tagline and key visual, a sample description of a radio spot or a storyboard for a television spot.
Examples of Integrated SBCC Concepts
Uganda: “How is life?”
Ghana: “What is your good life?”
Egypt: “Your health, your wealth.”
Malawi: “Life is precious.”
Tanzania: “Love me, parents.”
Jordan: “Our Health, Our Responsibility.”
Testing Creative Concepts
Once you have developed several creative concepts for your integrated campaign, you need to test them with your audience. Your objective when concept testing for integrated SBCC initiatives is to determine which concept the audience understands and relates to most strongly. An emphasis of concept testing in an integrated program is to gain insight into how the audience views the links between the various topics and whether your concepts represent those linkages in a way the audience connects with. Find more information on how to test creative concepts here.
- Starting with your first concept, test each concept by itself first, and then show sample executions of the concept that demonstrate how different topics would roll out under this umbrella. Repeat with the other concepts.
- In addition to questions about attention, comprehension, motivation, personal relevance and cultural appropriateness, dive deeper into questions that ask how the audience understands the link of the topics within the concept.
- After showing each concept individually, ask the audience to compare and rank them. Which do they prefer and why? Is the concept selected still in line with your strategy?
Developing SBCC Materials
After deciding on the creative concept, it is time to design and pre-test the actual integrated SBCC materials. Consider holding a materials review and adaptation workshop, using the materials acquired during your materials inventory as a starting point. Reviewing and updating, improving, re-branding or otherwise adjusting accurate, already approved materials helps save time during the approval process. To ensure they fit with your strategy and link with new topics, you may need to add elements from your creative concept, update some language or include a new tagline or slogan.
HC3 resources provide more information on how to develop and adapt SBCC materials. Some examples of integrated SBCC materials are provided in the Project Examples at the end of this section.
Pretesting SBCC Materials
To the extent possible, pretest methods should match the method(s) being used for message delivery. For example, if topics will be phased, the messages and materials for each topic can be pretested separately. But if the messages/materials for topics will be conveyed concurrently, they should be pretested together.
Inquire about the acceptability of integrated communication, whether for providers discussing new topics with clients presenting for other reasons or for bringing different topics/behaviors together under a single brand. Do audiences make (and accept) the desired connections between topics/behaviors? In Rwanda, for example, those conducting the pretest asked vaccinators: “Is the vaccination encounter an appropriate place to communicate about family planning and PMTCT?” In Liberia, the project tested the amount of time it would take for vaccinators to use an integrated family planning and immunization job aid with a client in a clinic setting. This was important in assessing the feasibility of introducing the new step in each of their client visits.
If possible, have providers pilot-test and give the program feedback on new tools and practices so they can be adjusted as needed before full program implementation. See the HC3 guide on how to conduct pretesting for more information.
Program Experiences
- Tanzania’s Wazazi Nipendeni safe motherhood campaign initially covered the period from pregnancy to delivery. The campaign later extended to the first year of the child’s life in a second phase, and brought in a number of additional health issues, such as early and exclusive breastfeeding, immunization and post-partum family planning. The flexible and inclusive nature of the creative concept allowed for its expansion.
- In Uganda, FHI360 developed the Obulamu (“How is life?”) umbrella campaign. The concept was flexible enough to adapt to different life stage audiences. For young couples, it turned into “How’s your love life?” For pregnant women and partners, “How’s your pregnancy?” For young families, “How’s Baby Opjo?” and for adolescent boys and girls, “What’s up?”
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Designing Linkages