mBCC Field Guide: A Resource for Developing Mobile Behavior Change Communication Programs

This website from the mHealth Working Group presents a collaborative effort to assemble a field guide to behaviour change communication (BCC) with a request for public feedback: "The proposed field guide will help its target audience understand the language and jargon of mobile technology, make decisions for the design of an mBCC campaign or integrate mobile channels into a multi-channel campaign, and provide useful templates and tools for implementation. The primary audience for the field guide is BCC practitioners at the field level, who may not have access to resources that provide tactical strategies for mobile BCC programs. A secondary audience for the guide is donor organizations, who will be able to scan resources to gauge various types of programs, examples of innovation, as well as potential sustainability of programs...."

"The mHealth Working Group has launched an mBCC Technical Group to focus on the development of a field guide which will assist programmers to develop BCC campaigns through mobile channels.  This site is intended to provide a Draft Objective and Proposed Components of a field guide to encourage and increase collaboration between the mBCC community. Please browse through the component tabs above and provide your comments on component content. As of now, we  have initial Glossary terms and a draft of the Decision Tree online. As new content is collected by component content managers through comments and other drafting, it will appear as blog posts.

The mBCC field guide is a collaborate process of the mBCC Technical Group. The final product will be the work of the participating members of the group and the format of final content will be finalized through discussions over the next months.

The mBCC Technical Group is part of the mHealth Working Group.  Please refer to the webpage and listserv for further information about the group."

Included in the contents are the followiing:

• Overview of the mBCC Field Guide
• How to Use This Guide 
• Situation Analysis
  •  Asking Key Questions 
  • Looking at Mobiles as a Communication Channel 
  • Determining Potential Audiences 
  • Identifying Potential Objectives, Messages, and Communication Tools and Technologies 
  • Assessing the Environment 
  • Considering BCC Theory 
  • Section Wrap Up

• Audience Segmentation
  • How Do You Identify the Right Audience Segments? 
  • How Do You Prioritize Segments?  
  • Who Are Influencing Audiences?  
  • Creating a Snapshot of the Primary Audience 
  • What is the Context of the Audience’s Mobile Communication?

• Behavior Change Objectives  
  • Keeping your Behavior Objectives “SMART” 
  • Stating the Behavior Change That Will Meet the Audience’s Health Needs 
  • Being Realistic About How Mobile Phones Can Support Behavior Change 
  • What is the Time Frame for Change?
  • Identifying Indicators to Track

• Message Development
  • Formative Research
  • The Creative Brief  
  • The Importance of Carefully Crafting Messages 
  • Why Pretest Messages? 
  • Integrating Monitoring and Evaluation Into the Crafting of Your Message

• Tools & Technologies
  • Technology Considerations 
  • What Communication Tools Should You Use? 
  • Reach and Frequency  
  • Multi-channel Approach 
  • What Platforms and Applications Will You Use? 
  • What is Your Internal Capacity? 
  • What Are the Roles of People Involved in the mBCC Program?

• Monitoring & Evaluation
  • Issues and Challenges in M&E of mBCC Programs 
  • Monitoring 
  • Evaluation 
  • M&E Template 
  • Documenting and Disseminating Results 
  • More Information on M&E .

• Conclusion
• References

Two separate documents in PDF format include:

Attachment: Evaluation Formdocument
Attachment: mBCC Program Requirements Worksheets