2.1 Identify Outreach Strategy

QUICK LINKS
2.1.1 Finalize selection of priority target behaviours based on audience understanding
2.1.2 Define what outreach activities need to achieve to support target audience’s adoption of desired behaviours
2.1.3 Identify communication strategy/activities for reaching target audience and supporting their adoption of desired behaviours
2.1.4 Develop monitoring plan
Tools and resources helpful to supporting this step

2.1.1 Finalize selection of priority target behaviours based on audience understanding

Now that you have gained deeper understanding of the target audience in relation to prioritized target behaviours, make a final selection of the target behaviour this SOC will focus on. You can revisit results from your original prioritization of target behaviours and reassess the behaviours to see if priorities may have changed based on insights gained from your target audience assessment. Alternatively, if through your target audience assessments, you have identified barriers to change which are unlikely to be addressed through an outreach campaign, you may wish to consider:

1. Revisiting the full list of behaviours originally identified and select new alternative actions/behaviours to target using criteria for prioritizing behaviours based on understanding gained from audience insight assessment (refer to criteria in section 1.1.4.)
2. Identifying other projects or stakeholders, addressing any identified barriers to behaviour change, and/or consider partnering or integrating your outreach project within the work of others to address critical barriers to change beyond the scope of your outreach project to address
3. As part of the process of finalizing the selection of the target behaviour, consider organizing a workshop to share and validate your understanding of audience insights. It is useful to engage other stakeholders to be part of this validation process (e.g. community-based organizations (CBOs) or other likeminded national and international organizations). This can enable sharing of useful insights, avoid duplication of efforts, and identify potential opportunities for collaboration or partnership which can strengthen the project and support delivery of outreach messaging. Engaging stakeholders early in the planning phase can help improve joint ownership of project aims and outcomes, and better mitigate potential risks and challenges. Engaging these different stakeholders can also bring valuable insights and expertise regarding safeguarding and promoting gender equality considerations expertise.

A Behaviour Change Planning Table has been provided in the facilitator’s resource which you can update with selected target behaviours, target audience, and COM-B barriers to change identified from previous steps (Steps 1-3 in the table).

2.1.2 Define what outreach activities need to achieve to support target audience’s adoption of desired behaviours

You now understand the barriers and benefits of the behaviours you want to encourage and discourage. Next, you will need design an effective strategy for how to tackle each behaviour. Activities must be carefully planned to avoid unnecessarily reinforcing inequality or doing harm to people in your community. Ensure attention to gender mainstreaming considerations throughout the planning process (refer to the facilitator resource 1. Gender Mainstreaming Checklist for further guidance).

For your SOC strategy to support behaviour change, you must bear in mind the stages of change from awareness to action when planning the timing and sequencing of messages. First, identify whether the target audience is ready to change and design activities to engage them only when they are ready. Next, identify the types, timing, and series of activities needed to move audiences step-by-step towards behaviour change goals.

Theory of change, in this case using the COM-B framework, helps to determine the most effective ways to influence target audiences. Describe in a few simple sentences or on a chart what your outreach or campaign is intending to achieve and how. This will enable to you manage expectations about what the project can and cannot do for the community. In addition, it is recommended to design this with representative members of your target audience and discuss with people who know nothing about your project, to check the logic for how change can be achieved and ensure it is clearly understood and hasn’t missed something or relied on misinformed assumptions. See diagram below to guide the process.

As behaviour change is rarely a simple process and behaviours usually comprise numerous sub-behaviours look to designing a step-by-step communication approach that can move people towards the desired action incrementally. Begin with behaviours that have minimal skill requirements and are relatively easily attainable for your target community then gradually build in further steps that require more complex effort.

For sustained use of the new target behaviour, you will need to think about using behaviour specific prompts to remind and engage people, particularly if the target behaviour is repetitive and not just a one off. So, ensure the prompt is noticeable and self-explanatory – perhaps a pictorial prompt, which could be placed in a stable or barn, for instance to remind owners about giving sufficient clean water. Alternatively, think about ways in which the target behaviour can be linked to an existing habit or routine behaviour.

Social norms influence community behaviour, they are the rules and beliefs governed by peer-to-peer interactions. Ensure any recommendation included in your messaging are connected to the community’s social norms, encouraging respected influencers within the community to act as early adopters and enlist community leaders or well respected and influential members of the community who can help spread the message via social diffusion. To do this find members of the target audience who are keen to be involved and are influential within their own community, for instance, animal owners are more likely to observe and adopt similar practices if they see other animal owners practicing the target behaviour and showing positive results from doing so [31].

Asking for a commitment from early adopters to practice the target behaviour and in addition speak to their peers about what they are doing and why, is effective for longer term sustainable change. For social diffusion to work well the behaviour must be visible to others, so start with target behaviours where others can see what is being done, for instance changes to harnessing equipment or erecting a shelter. Using influencers within the community can increase confidence in what is being suggested and lower barriers to the adoption of the target behaviours.

2.1.3 Identify communication strategy/activities for reaching target audience and supporting their adoption of desired behaviours

After diagnosing what needs to change and having identified what your outreach activities need to achieve make that change it should be possible to identify the communication strategy that will be most effective at achieving the desired change. It is recommended to use the Behaviour Change Wheel to support the identification of intervention functions and behaviour change techniques (BCTs). The Behaviour Change Wheel provides a systematic and theoretically guided method for identifying the most effective strategies to implement to support adoption of a desired behaviour. Refer to facilitator resource 13. Guidance On Identifying Effective Behaviour Change Strategies Based On Com-B Diagnosis based on the behaviour change wheel.

Gender mainstreaming and safeguarding considerations are extremely important and different target actors may require different considerations, channels of communication and methods, and design of activities. Evaluate how to best promote equal access to communication, and when selecting representative messengers ensure equality in representation (e.g. not just men or non-marginalized groups etc.). Most importantly do no harm; when employment in a particular role may force actors outside the social norm you must socialize acceptance of this more broadly, or it could cause communications to be poorly received and cause fallout/backlash to them or the project.

Once you have identified the intervention functions, and related BCTs use the APEASE criteria, adapted from [21], to narrow your selection to those BCTs which meet the criteria to identify those most effective:

• Acceptability: Is the outreach/campaign suitable for the target audience?
• Practicability: Is the outreach or campaign appropriate for this context and are resources sufficient for implementation?
• Effectiveness: How effective is it likely to be when considering the aims and objectives?
• Affordability: Are the financial resources sufficient to support the SOC approach at the scale intended?
• Side-effects: How likely is it to lead to unintended adverse or beneficial outcomes?
• Equity: Does the approach ensure safeguarding, avoid discrimination and have you ensured it is not gender blind / gender exploitative? Sometimes consequences can be unintended (e.g. further legitimizes or exacerbates gender inequalities).

Use your understanding of your target audience to develop relevant activities that will appeal to them and be understood. Engage key influencers and leaders within your target community to help guide which activities will be most appropriate to reach the target audience. The aim is to develop a mix of communication activities that address all (or as many as possible) of the “changes your activities need to achieve” (see Step 4 of the Behaviour Change Planning Table), recognizing the same activity can address more than one of the changes that need to be achieved [20].
It is important to note that for any one behaviour targeted for change, a variety of methods and communication messages may be needed to promote desired changes and address animal welfare practice gaps amongst different target audiences and their access to different modes of communication are considered (guidance on developing messaging provided in section 2.2.1).

When developing behaviour change activities, it is recommended to at the very least use the following advice based on research from The Behavioural Insights Team about what makes behaviour change activities most successful, by checking that any behaviour change strategies you decide to implement are designed to make doing the behaviour EAST: Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely [20]:

• Easy: Learn what makes practicing the behaviour difficult and help your priority groups to make it easier – involving less hassle, time, or money. If you promote a complex goal, break it down into smaller actions.
• Attractive: People are motivated to do something when it brings them what they want most, such as income, peace of mind, happiness, or good health. Ensure that your activities help people experience the benefits of practicing the behaviour by, for example, letting them test it (e.g. experience using a new type of welfare friendly equipment); sharing successful examples (e.g. of an animal owning family who reduced the incidence of animal illness by adopting the promoted prevention techniques); and using appealing messages that engage people’s emotions.
• Social: People are heavily influenced by what people around them do. So, let’s take advantage of it! Showing that some people already practice the promoted behaviour, using the power of social networks (e.g. peer-to-peer), or encouraging people to commit to someone to practice a behaviour often works well!
• Timely: The same activity conducted at different times can have drastically different levels of success. Schedule your activities for when people are most receptive and available (e.g. scheduling activities so they don’t occur when people are busy with work or engaged in special events, promoting preventative animal health checks after harvest when people have money; posting feed preparation messages next to where animals’ feed is prepared).

When planning and budgeting for behaviour change activities, It is recommended to build in some flexibility to project work plans and budgets to enable you to address (at least some of the) barriers, which might not have been thought of earlier [20].

When thinking about behaviour change activities, it is also useful to ask - What are the channels of communication and methods or techniques that are most likely to effectively reach the target communities you are trying to engage with? While you may have limited direct contact or time with your target audience, involving your target audience to the extent feasible increases the likelihood of success of your outreach.

Consider the following recommendations for increasing community involvement in your outreach activities:

• Generate two-way communication, discussion, and dialogue amongst the target audience to the extent feasible by selecting channels of communication effective for reaching your target audience which support interactive activities (e.g. face to face, radio, TV, or social media). One-way communication using posters, booklets or leaflets alone is not enough to stimulate behaviour change to improve animal welfare.
• When designing activities, use communication methods that enable people to feel and express their experiences related to the problem behaviour and animal welfare issue, and its potential solutions. Seek to involve and stimulate interaction with your target audience as much as possible, as well as the sharing of experiences and learning between them.
• Identify role models and champions to share their stories over interactive programs (TV, radio, larger community events, etc.). Other people can hear from those who are performing the behaviour, feel self-efficacy and excitement, create social norms. Using them as champions will also help them further maintain their behaviour as it helps them to be acknowledged and recognized and feel good about their animal welfare improvement efforts.

Whenever feasible, consider methods and tools that meaningfully involve people (e.g. through experiential learning, participatory approaches, using Motivational Interviewing principles, and values-based communication). For example, a cat population control national outreach campaign in the UK seeking to increase cat neutering rates effectively used values-based communication to frame their messages to reflect the human characteristics and behaviours owners often attribute to their cats to help appeal to people about the well-being of the cat.

The following section provide an overview of commonly used communication channels and outreach methods for consideration when designing your outreach activities.

Examples of communication channels include:

• Awareness campaigns: Awareness or communication campaigns are one of the most important channels for delivering messages to large target audiences. However, the messages selected, mode of transmission, media of transmission and timing consideration are determining factors. Linking campaigns with other appropriate events can be even more effective in enabling them to achieve their intended aims.

4. Recorded songs or stories are often very popular and can be played using low cost, low-tech communication systems such as car batteries or a generator. During meetings, public gatherings, fairs, and exhibitions, recorded materials can be used as part of interactive discussions in large forums. These recorded programmes can focus on specific animal management practices or cover more general welfare themes. Material can be recorded with the help of professional teams, or by the community itself. An example of community-generated recording is the use of Participatory Videography, (see the further reading and reference list for a good manual on participatory video).
5. Radio Programming: Organizing interactive radio programmes is good and this can also be supplemented with radio listeners groups if this SOC approach is being used to complement CD approach. Moreover, enabling the journalists to invite experts in the studio for an interactive segment might be good. Another element is to facilitate working to visit by journalists or radio program drama writers to different areas to enhance the program is grounded on people’s reality and by enabling them to interview different people’s experiences or challenges or more particularly those who can be described as models or early adopters of the desired behaviour will give colour to the radio program and enhances audience’s engagement. However, it is important to note that journalist may not have an animal welfare background and they might need an initial training as well as support in the crafting of messages and program sequencing. Another element to consider is the value for money of radio programmes in terms of prime-time vs budget required; and the social responsibility of media houses behind this to ensure appropriate messaging by the radio station. (At least they need to have a do no harm in their other programs) to ensure they are credible source of information.
6. Posters, murals, leaflets, and newsletters: Posters should be used for brief animal welfare messages and work best if the message is visual. Leaflets may be used to communicate more technical information. Make sure that you know the literacy level of your target group when making leaflets. Community members in some communities may not be literate so written leaflets may not be best for them, although they could be very effective in promoting good welfare to agricultural outreach staff.
7. Murals or billboards highlighting various issues have often been used by advertising agencies to pass messages to people from all walks of life. They normally integrate visuals to help imprint on people’s minds. They should have relatively simple, catchy, and appealing visuals, conveying a particular theme and message, and be strategically placed in high use areas such as near main roads, churches, schools, watering points and at market centres.
8. Newsletters can be useful for literate audiences and are used for a variety of reasons including:
   
   Sharing success and learning between animal-owning groups within a district, inspiring and developing an element of competition and pride between these groups by:
   
   • providing evidence and stories of success,
   • providing public recognition of success which increases the self-esteem of group members,
   • providing technical information and promote indigenous technical knowledge.

9. Involvement of Schools: Schools can be the broadest channel for disseminating knowledge and helping communities to develop healthy attitudes and practices. Teachers are in regular contact with school children and their parents. They are also influential and respected members of their communities. With guidance from their teachers, school children can also become welfare messengers within their own families and communities, for example, establishing animal welfare clubs through schools can raise student awareness on animal welfare issues so that children serve as change agents influencing their parents. To attain these objectives, first and foremost engaging directors and teachers is important and through them bringing attitudinal changes of students is possible. The following considerations and tasks are important in the process of engaging with schools.
   
   These include (but not limited to):
   
   • Identifying schools used by the target community.
   • Train school club members, provide additional coaching support to school clubs and more particularly to girls and/or children from vulnerable/marginalized animal owning families.
   • Select candidate schools for disseminating animal welfare messages by setting criteria (such as student population, availability of equipment for message dissemination, animal population in the school surrounding communities, willingness of the school administrators to work on animal welfare issues).
   • Allowing for and agreeing on sufficient time, locations, and staff members to take part in initial engagement and training on animal welfare messaging to be disseminated.
   • Understanding potential safeguarding needs of students and ensuring measures are put in place to mitigate safeguarding issues.
   • Inviting selected school community for sessions to provide engagement and training on animal welfare messaging to be disseminated.
   • Conducting the engagement and facilitating discussions on animal welfare issues.
   • Assessing the capacity of each school to undertake animal welfare promotion activities and identifying the supporting resources needed to implement it and potential sources for obtaining them.
   • Preparing small action plans and signing memorandum of understanding. The plans may include (but not limited to): animal welfare club establishment, preparing animal welfare messages by talented students, disseminating the messages both inside and external to the school environment, preparing follow up and monitoring mechanisms.
   • Designing joint follow up and reviewing mechanisms and reporting modalities.

Depending on the project’s aims, target audience, channels of communication, and outreach methods, you might wish to consider use of the following participatory tools as part of your outreach activities:

Animal Welfare Snakes and Ladders Game (T16)
‘If I were an animal’ (T17)
Thriving not surviving (T18)
Animal Feeling Analysis (T19)
Story Telling (T24 a, b, c)
Animal Welfare Conversation Tool (T32)

To help ensure the effectiveness of your activities, consider referring to the SOC approach’s recommended readings and external resources section related to your chosen communication channels and methods for additional guidance before developing or implementing your outreach activities and communication materials.

2.1.4 Develop monitoring plan    

Now that you have developed your outreach strategy, you must determine how best to assess its success by developing a monitoring plan that includes indicators of success, sampling parameters including size and representation of different demographics, monitoring methods and related data collection tools, as well as frequency of monitoring. It is helpful to design your monitoring framework and indicators in a participatory manner with the some of the target audience and any other users of the information as they can provide useful feedback to help inform and adapt your monitoring plan and generate support for your outreach or campaign by the relevant stakeholders.

As sometimes behaviour change is a dynamic journey that faces backlash, resistance, and relapse; it is best practice to devise a group or supporting organization that can easily monitor such subtle changes frequently (e.g. monthly) to ensure ease of recall; capturing this may not necessarily be in a written report but captions, photos, video, and so on. Photos are a great way to facilitate participatory monitoring and generate content for outreach materials/discussions/viewing on digital or video platforms.

What indicators enable you to assess the success of your SOC project? Think about driving a car – you don’t have to know what each part of the engine is doing; you just need to know the key elements that mean the car is working. The dashboard, therefore, doesn’t include 100 or more different measures of how the engine is performing, it just gives you an indication of the key things – fuel, oil, etc. and a big red light usually comes on if you really need to stop! This is like the approach to measuring progress of our outreach work. You cannot monitor every single element but must focus on monitoring what you expect will change because of your outreach project. Above all keep things simple and develop a small number of indicators to capture changes. Ensure indicators you select can support disaggregated analysis of results by target audience demographics relevant to your project (e.g. men, women, marginalized groups, urban/rural etc.). This will enable you to assess how successful the project was in equitably reaching different demographics and help identify when you may need to adapt your strategy to better reach some groups.

When thinking about what to assess, consider the following:

1. Impact Indicators: indicators allow you to assess progress towards higher level goals. Impact level indicators may be focused on how animal welfare has improved because of the project by assessing the following:
   • Indicators of animal welfare that reflect what you would expect to improve due to the project e.g. number of, or severity of wounds, disease prevalence or severity.
2. Outcome Indicators: outcome indicators should enable determination of the extent to which project activities achieved their stated aims. This will include indicators of behaviour change for SOC projects designed with an aim of changing behaviour. Cognitive variables such as attitude and knowledge change among individuals and in wider society are also commonly used indicators for assessing outreach and awareness raising campaigns’ success. Outcome indicators are also often related to the identified barriers to behaviour change which the project is seeking to address. Consider assessing changes in perceptions (attitudes) or awareness, ability (e.g. knowledge, skills), availability of/access to information/communications/support e.g. “XX% of women animal owners who know where to seek quality animal health services” (refer to Behaviour Change Planning Table step 4) [20].
3. Output Indicators: indicators related to output should enable assessment of how well the project activities were implemented, as opposed to measure the resultant changes that emerge because of activities.
   • Refer to project activities you listed in the Behaviour change planning table (step 4) and develop indicators for each activity. For example:
     • Total number of male/female animal owning community members attending educational event.
     • Total number radio programmes delivered
     • Total number of educational posters or murals displayed publicly
     • Amount of traffic increase on a website after outreach

When behaviour change is the aim of your project, it is also helpful to assess the following in addition to behavioural indicators outlined above [20]:

• Why people practice the promoted behaviours? - such findings provide extremely useful lessons for further promotion of these behaviours
• Why do people not practice the promoted behaviours? - such findings are crucial for understanding factors which may be undermining success of your project, and help you re-evaluate and/or adapt your strategy.

Once identified, update the Behaviour Change Planning Table with selected indicators (see step 6).

• Think about where you may be able to rely on existing data sources or use participatory monitoring methods e.g. website traffic; radio broadcast demographics/reach; records of treatments or observations of animal health service providers,
• Feedback from members of the target audience can be used for monitoring and evaluation purposes. Consider establishing feedback mechanisms or proactively reaching out to different demographics within your target audience or engaging a small group of proactive engaged target audience for their opinions and suggestions about the content and value of communications, and effectiveness of the project and whether it has affected their animal care and management practices.
• If considering self-reporting methods for capturing attitudes and attitudinal change (i.e. members of the target audience report on change), responses may be distorted by the respondents’ wish to give socially acceptable or desirable answers. To overcome this, you can triangulate data by obtaining information from 2 or 3 sources and use observation to give a broad perspective of the effectiveness of the programme.
• Ensure whatever monitoring methods and tools you select will enable you to collect data from/about relevant demographics within the target audience so you can assess the extent to which your outreach activities have equally reached and been effective proportionately across demographics. This is particularly important to assess to ensure your project has effectively understood and tailored its approach to address the different realities of target group demographics, and not further contributed to the marginalization of particularly vulnerable
• SOC projects often aim to reach large numbers of people often indirectly, so it is important to strike a balance between sufficient sample size to evaluate project success, ensuring inclusion of relevant representative demographics within the target audience (e.g. men, women, marginalized groups), and not overburdening the project. Think about how data will be used and by whom and aim to sample sufficiently to suite your purposes. For example, the understanding needed by your project requires a differently level of data reliability and certainty than would publishing results in a scientific paper.
• Applying a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection gives a more in depth understanding for evaluating project success.

1. At the project’s start: conduct a baseline survey of the projects’ selected impact and outcome indicators
2. At the end of the project: conduct an end line assessment to measure the animal welfare indicators and percentage of priority group members who practice the promoted behaviours and compare this to the results of your baseline assessments. It is recommended the end line assessment also assess the main reasons why people (did not) adopt the promoted behaviours.
3. 6 months- 2 years after the project: replicate the end line assessment of impact and outcome indicators to assess the extent to which changes have been sustained after the project.

Tools and resources helpful to supporting this step include:

Facilitator Resources
1. Gender mainstreaming checklist
12. Behaviour Change Planning Table
13. Guidance On Identifying Effective Behaviour Change Strategies Based On Com-B Diagnosis

Link to References Cited