Tools for Behavior Change Communication

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• Checklist: Behavior Change Communication Program Cycle
• Budgeting for Behavior Change Communication
• Model of an Audience Profile
• Checklist: Ensuring Good-Quality Materials
• Checklist: Working With the News Media
• Types of Evaluation: Purpose, Questions Answered, and Sample Indicators
• Subscription and Ordering Information
• Credits
• Bibliography

Model of an Audience Profile

How to use this tool: To help the creative team to develop effective messages and materials, the program team should tell a story about typical audience members. To do this, they create a profile that embodies the characteristics of the audience. The program and creative teams can imagine the audience as a specific person rather than as a collection of statistics.

The BCC program can collect information about the audience from existing data such as Ministry of Health statistics or health and population surveys. The program’s formative research can provide detail. Characteristics to consider include age, sex, marital status, place of residence, occupation, income level, years of schooling, religion, ethnicity, number of children, family structure, health beliefs, and degree of readiness to change behavior. Then, in the story the program team should describe the person’s important behaviors and some key attitudes about the health behavior that the program needs to address. The following example, created in a workshop to develop a national population communication strategy for Ghana, shows what an audience profile might look like.

“A Man in Ghana”

Meet Kwame. He is a farmer living in the Central Region and is 42 years old. He has two wives and five children ranging in age from 8 to 20. He lives a traditional Ghanaian rural lifestyle. He spends his early morning tending his field and spends the late afternoon with his friends in the chop bar. Although he considers himself to be a family man, he occasionally has extramarital affairs. He cares about his children’s wellbeing and would like them to live a better life than he does. He cares about his two wives because they raise his children.

However, he is not at ease communicating with them about intimate matters, such as reproductive health. He assumes that they know what to do. He is also more comfortable having his wives talk to their children about these matters than talking to them himself.

Sources: O’Sullivan et al. 2003 (14), Yonkler 1998 (26), and Younger et al. 2001 (27)