The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
Volume VII, Number 1, Winter 2001
Issue Topic: Strategic Communications
From the Director's Desk
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| Heather Weiss |
We all know how effective good advertising can be, for better or for worse. It can help us to make good consumer decisions or make us want french fries in spite of our New Year's resolution. But as one recent Boston subway campaign from the Horizons Initiative put it so well, “A cute kid on TV can get you to spend $900 on tires. Can one on a poster get you to spend two hours with homeless kids?”
Advertisements like this are an important element of strategic communications campaigns, asking audiences to think about the important issues that face families and children. As programs work to meet needs, achieve social change and influence policy, a strategic communications campaign is a critical means of educating the public about a problem and the specific ways in which the public can invest in the solution, be it through volunteering two hours a week, writing a legislator a letter or buckling a seatbelt.
Strategic communications, as we understand it, encompasses a broad range of activities. Communications campaigns can include subway and television ads, grassroots organizing, coalition building at the local and national levels, large-scale campaigns to change attitudes and behaviors such as smoking and strategies to build public will to increase investments in early care and education, just to name a few. We have discovered through our exploration that strategic communications and the related field of social marketing are too large to cover in one edition of a newsletter. Based in this exploration, our goal is to articulate a vision for the integration of strategic communications and efforts to evaluate them into the work of nonprofits. This vision has been greatly enhanced by our interviews with prominent people in the field including the contributors to this issue. We begin what we hope will be an ongoing conversation about the role and value of strategic communications by focusing this edition on, important issues for programs to consider as they implement and evaluate strategic communications campaigns.
Our investigation shows that more and more non-profits are struggling to develop strategic communications capacity and to use communications as a tool to help achieve their service, public policy and fund raising goals. Just as there is a continuum of integration of evaluation into programs, there is a continuum for strategic communications. Evaluators have argued long and hard-and successfully-for the incorporation of evaluation from the outset of a program or initiative. Our conversations with those in the strategic communications field, such as Elizabeth Heid Thompson of Sutton Social Marketing, Pat Lewis of The Communications Network and Lori Dorfman of the Berkeley Media Studies Group suggest that non-profits and others increasingly understand the importance of inviting the strategic communications expert to the table, along with the evaluator, at the very first planning meetings.
With this comes the challenge of evaluating the contribution of the communications strategy components and of examining their value-added. As Elizabeth Heid Thompson pointed out, an evaluator who does not include the strategic communications aspect of the program or initiative misses all important means by which outcomes may be achieved. Efforts to address these challenges are in their infancy. It is our sense that the integration of evaluation efforts that provide information for planning and continuous improvement as well as for assessment of impact is critical to support and assess strategic communications work. Therefore, the articles in this issue range from the basics of how to use organizational learning to prepare for strategic communications planning and the abc's of making a strategic plan to examples of large scale, complex research and coalition-building initiatives in which strategic communications is incorporated from the early planning stages.
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange is designed both to acquaint those less familiar with strategic communications with the framework and basic concepts, and for those more familiar, to describe an array of applications and campaigns within the child, youth and family arenas. We have also made a special effort to assemble some of the best resources for learning more about strategic communications for our readers in the New and Noteworthy section.
We will continue to explore the role of evaluation and value-added of strategic communications in efforts to inform and build public will to improve outcomes for children and families in future issues. Please give us your feedback on this issue and alert us to useful examples and resources to include in future issues.
Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D.
Founder & Director
Harvard Family Research Project