Topic 8 communication for social change

• The key characteristic of media fare is that it is not presented in an overtly didactic way, but is meant to be consumed as entertainment.
• Communication for social change is the art and science of human communication applied to the speedy transformation of a country and the mass of its people from poverty to a dynamic state of economic growth that makes possible greater social equality and larger fulfilment of the human potential.
• Communication for social change is a philosophy of service which the Ministry under the Department of Public Information has evolved to guide in its work.
• Communication for social change is communication for planned change, communication that consciously promotes development, and is meant first of all, to diminish poverty, unemployment and inequality.
• Communication for social change involves community participation, information dissemination, persuading people to change their habits, lifestyle or ways of thought, and social mobilization.
• Communication for social change involves multiple levels of intervention at scale, and well thought out and evidence based communication across all sectors of society.
• Communication for social change involves social mobilisation.
• Social marketing is the use of established advertising techniques to promote development goals via media such as TV, radio, newspapers and billboards etc.
• Social marketing has adopted not only the forms of marketing, but also its tools: consumer research, pretesting, and audience segmentation.
• Mass media communication interventions can and do impact on subjective norms, interpersonal communication and debate (and ultimately desired behaviour) through a number of mechanisms such as modeling behaviour, choices and consequences, through para-social interaction, the deep emotional engagement that audience has with the characters and through the “legitimizing effect”.
• Most media-based development projects can be placed into the social marketing category.
• The Social Change Communication Model includes three levels: Individual, Community, and Society.
• Entertainment education messages may be carried by, for example, a soap opera or popular song specifically written for that purpose, or in vignettes inserted into variety shows.
• Education entertainment is a subset of social marketing, defined as the process of purposely designing and implementing a media message to both entertain and educate, in order to increase audience knowledge about an educational issue, create favorable attitudes, and change overt behavior.
• The two main techniques adopted in the use of various media in development communication are social marketing and its subset education entertainment.
• The role of media in this process includes audience, transition, popularization, visual aids/graphics, and use of various media in development communication.