Development action with informed and engaged societies
As of March 15 2025, The Communication Initiative (The CI) platform is operating at a reduced level, with no new content being posted to the global website and registration/login functions disabled. (La Iniciativa de Comunicación, or CILA, will keep running.) While many interactive functions are no longer available, The CI platform remains open for public use, with all content accessible and searchable until the end of 2025. 

Please note that some links within our knowledge summaries may be broken due to changes in external websites. The denial of access to the USAID website has, for instance, left many links broken. We can only hope that these valuable resources will be made available again soon. In the meantime, our summaries may help you by gleaning key insights from those resources. 

A heartfelt thank you to our network for your support and the invaluable work you do.
Time to read
less than
1 minute
Read so far

Incorporating Digital M&E Strategies for SBC: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

0 comments

Abstract for Preformed Panel Presentation from the 2022 International SBCC Summit in Morocco:

"In 2020, there were an estimated 3.8 billion social media users worldwide. Social media platforms engage users in multidirectional communication and provide public health programs with a tool to inform and engage diverse audiences, as well as monitor opinions and behaviors on health topics. This presentation details the process used by USAID-funded Breakthrough RESEARCH to apply social media monitoring and social listening techniques in Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Niger, Togo and Nigeria for formative research, adaptive management and evaluation, and how lessons learned can be used to support future social behavior change (SBC) programs. The process involved six steps: 1) Ensure sufficient volume of topic-specific online conversation in target countries; 2) Develop measures to monitor SBC campaigns; 3) Identify search terms to assess target online conversations; 4) Quantitatively assess target audience demographics, campaign reach, and engagement through social media monitoring; 5) Qualitatively assess audience attitudes, opinions and behaviors through social media listening; and 6) Adapt online SBC programmatic content and engagement based on analysis. Lessons learned include understanding who uses social media in implementation countries and testing relevant social media platforms and their limitations; refining key search terms, considering local variations in language for best results; and systematically introduce designated hashtags across platforms to facilitate conversation monitoring and social listening for new campaigns. With the rise in internet and social media penetration alongside the accelerated development of artificial intelligence to enhance rapid data extraction and analysis, these methodologies will become increasingly relevant for SBC research and evaluation."

Source

Approved abstract for the 2022 SBCC Summit in Marrakech, Morocco. From SBCC Summit documentation. Image credit: Breakthrough ACTION