Engagement for Change: Entwining Behavior and Communication
Monjure Alahi Haider
Seasoned marketing communication expert-storyteller-video production specialist
A Brief Context of Behavioral Change Communication
Behavioral science has been a popular discourse for the past few decades, especially at the dawn of the 20th century. The practice started officially at the mass level during the devastating world wars and the ensuing cold war in the last century. Human behavior is one of the toughest to engineer and most profitable to exploit. Crafting behavioral science for the well-being of societies, hence the world has been ever since a crucial role for communications practitioners across the world.
If you want to pursue a community to do something, there are four stages of crafting their behavior:
To make something obvious, you need to speak a lot about it. Also, your target audience should be well-informed about what you are saying. At the same time, you need to present social proof that your issue is necessary, urgent, and practiced by a lot of people out there.
Imagine a community, desperately suffering from garbage mismanagement. Dirt and leftovers crowd the streets and make living difficult for the people. You want the community people to take one step at a time to solve this issue. What should be the first step? Can you reckon?
The most obvious one is to motivate them to use dustbins. Mass communication or communication only cares about making people aware of an issue. You can circulate information about the hazardous effects of mistreating garbage, show them the specific harms, and a lot of awareness content with emotion, humor, or conviction. However, at some point, they will feel motivated and forget about the content anyway. Because that's the way it works. If you stop campaigning, things will go back to their previous state. But imagine a campaign that shapes their behavior! A campaign that engraves practices in their mind and makes them feel for putting garbage in the right place. Yes, that's the kind of campaign we call a 'behavioral change communication campaign (BCC).' Keep aside the mouthful jargon, it will even make more sense. A kind of communication that helps people to carve their behavior. How would you do it for the case above? Simple, make it obvious. Put promotional material in every possible cluster of dumps and remind them that the garbage should not be here. Put them where they belong.
Make it attractive. Design the bins in an eye-catching manner. Each time you see a bin, it should shout out aloud, 'Hey buddy! I am here. Use me.' Make the campaign content consistent with the highlights you've been using everywhere.
Make it easy. Although making it easy to access requires a unified effort from every other department related to garbage management. However, there are some crucial scopes for you as well. Such as posting signage where people usually dump the garbage so that they can find the bins easily.
Make it satisfying. This is a crucial stage for a BCC practitioner. There are multiple ways to make it satisfying. You can make the colors of the bins attractive and eye soothing, install a beautiful jingle that rings when someone dumps garbage in the bins, or whatnot. In addition, if you want to boost the ego of the target audience, make them crave dumping garbage into bins, then promote peer pressure. Highlight or reward the users of the bins. Create hype on social media about the conscious users of the bins. Everyone will spontaneously follow the lead of the awardees. In fact, create advocacy campaigns by influential people in the community.
You'll see the magic of the BCC campaign, the charismatic charm of this discourse only if you learn how to engineer people's cognition, hence, behavior. And trust me, engagement is the part that conceives satisfaction and attraction of the target audience entwined. See the case study of a campaign in the next chapter to fathom the concept.
A Winning Campaign-RTI Day 2021
Keeping that in mind, we organized a small-scale campaign in 2021 to celebrate Right to Information Day. Usually, we celebrate the day every year, however, it was special that year because of a successful campaign. We called for selfies from our audience in 21 project districts holding a written text about the right to information. Some wrote about their expectation from the RTI Act, some expressed their feelings about the right to information, and others wrote rhythmic slogans about RTI. Not only the community people, the government officials too participated with much enthusiasm.
In total, we had more than 200 submissions. All of them posted their photos in public from their own profiles and added a couple of relevant hashtags.
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Challenges of and How We Solved Them
We have to keep in mind that issues such as policy, democratic rights, and civic engagement do not attract much attention from the mass. Because they are pretty hard to understand and require a minimum level of prior knowledge. For these reasons, most of the commoners out there do not feel proximity to the campaigns. However, a communication expert must translate hard-to-understand issues into comprehensive content and establish a relevant connection with the audience. There are fancy terms to define the methodology, however, we used one of the most common methods of keeping the audience engaged. It's called the AIDA. A for attention, I for interest, D for desire, and A for action. Imagine you are responsible for running a social media campaign on an issue for raising public awareness. It's part of a behavioral change advocacy program. How would you use AIDA there? Well, there are multiple ways.
This example is too linear to be a professional strategy, yet a simple demonstration of how we can use a theory in a pragmatic manner. It's a good method of translating a tough concept into a linear and comprehensive message.
Achievements from the Campaign
What did we achieve from this campaign? A number of things I would say.
It was one of the six-cycle campaigns we ran on RTI. The strategic campaigns altogether brought a wholesome result. However, I guess this micro campaign is enough to portray the significance of the whole movement. We need to keep in mind that all campaigns are not intended to go viral nor they suppose to because meeting up the objective of the campaign should get the top priority whenever a strategy is crafted.
A Bit More...Story of Selling a Taboo
Can you remember the last ten years of the 20th century? Health campaigns were at their most in developing and underdeveloped countries. One of the most popular campaigns was hand hygiene. Washing your hand after getting fresh and before taking food- reduced a lot of bacterial and contagious diseases. And of course, the neo-natal health sector saw a significant development after executing several behavioral change campaigns at the grassroots about vaccination, nutrition for pregnant women, and the extra care of neonatal health by ensuring a nutritious diet. Especially, awareness against AIDS was one of the most successful and culturally challenged campaigns in our country. Because STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) are something our people have always been extremely shy of. All these challenging social changes were possible because of two game-changing concepts:
Whenever we think about changing people's behavior toward something, first comes changing attitude. What is attitude? Is it a single term? Or a compilation of terms and jargon? From my 6.5 years of experience working in the marketing communications industry, I have rather felt this word a lot more than learning about it. Why not jump into a real-life case study to feel attitude? Because, from my understanding, attitude is so crucial for behavioral change communication that without considering it before a campaign, all the effort and money may go in vain for nothing.
Once upon a time, there was a company, passionate about selling condoms. They spent an ample amount of money and effort to advertise their products. However, people held the same attitude toward the product. They did not like the product at all. Why would they? It was after all a product that snatches away the natural pleasure that's been as it is for thousands of years. In addition, they don't want to bring it up in public. Indian subcontinent by default is a place swarming with conservations, preassumed notions, and a culture of keeping it inside the walls. Therefore, no matter how much you advertise the product, people are not going to buy it. There's no reason to do so. Because the effect of not using a condom was a far-fetched one, or worse, an unknown one. The CEO and the marketing manager decided to change people's attitudes toward condoms first. Because otherwise, no matter how loud, repetitive, and consistent they are in their campaigns. Nothing seems to change.
After almost three years of behavior change campaigns, they saw something very significant. Their sales were increasing and people replaced the very idea of condoms with their brand name. That's an equity a company can cash for centuries. What else has been achieved from this initiative besides business? We have been seeing campaigns against AIDS for almost a decade now. Using condoms is one of the best ways to prevent aids from spreading as an epidemic. Businesses in our society can shape the betterment of people in multiple ways as this. And behavioral change communication is a crucial tool for implementing a mass-level change in human behavior.
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