Building an SBC Strategy

Introduction

Objective

This document serves as a guide for how to develop a Social and Behaviour Change (SBC) Strategy or Plan for a single-country or multi-country SBC programme.    
Developing an SBC Strategy hinges upon understanding the unique circumstances and world views of the individuals the strategy seeks to serve. These insights will help you design customised solutions for local challenges. By understanding the barriers to certain behaviours, services or a system from the perspective of community members, you will be able to develop more sensitive, evidence-based and human-centred solutions that respond to people’s needs. To learn more about building people-centred solutions, view our  tool on Human-Centred Design.

This document will walk you through how to develop an SBC Plan or Strategy. Each step will include links to tools that will help you think systematically and creatively about your situation.    
At the end of the document, you will find an SBC Plan / Strategy template that you can use to guide you through the process.

The process

We have outlined 12 steps to build an SBC Strategy, broken into four phases. There is no timeline associated with this process, and we encourage you to go at your own pace.

Phase I: Discovery    
Step 1: Build a team that includes participating communities    
Step 2: Diagnose your situation - using models    
Step 3: Perform a reality check    
Step 4: Look for funding mechanisms and opportunities 

Phase II: Design, development and testing    
Step 5: Outline the needs of affected groups    
Step 6: Select SBC approaches    
Step 7: Develop a Theory of Change    
Step 8: Define results and select interventions    
Step 9: Determine the budget, timeline, risks and roles

Phase III: Implementation,monitoring and evaluation    
Step 10: Perform a baseline assessment    
Step 11: Test and iterate    
Step 12: Develop a plan for continued learning and iteration

It is important to note that your process might not be linear. You may need to go back and forth between steps or conduct certain steps simultaneously.

Let’s get started!

Phase I: Discovery

Step 1: Build a team that includes participating communities

Before diagnosing the situation at hand, you must broadly identify the primary issue. Begin by using your  preliminary understanding to rally together a team of stakeholders.    
Think about the core organizations and people that should be involved in the analysis, design and implementation of the strategy. Keep in mind that the same groups do not have to be involved at every stage. 

Consider the following questions when building your team:

• Who has local knowledge, expert knowledge, technical expertise and creative expertise? Consider members of government ministries, UN agencies, the private sector, local NGOs, civil society organizations (CSOs), as well as community leaders and representatives.  Who can best support design and/or implementation
• What partnerships do you need to implement the strategy? Would a partnership with certain religious organizations, technology companies, research groups, TV and radio stations, marketing agencies, or labour unions benefit implementation? Think about who you may need, and when to bring them in. Consider building a core team that expands at certain moments to bring in key voices.    
• Do you need a technical advisory or coordination group? Consider how these groups might assist with political and community buy-in and approval, partner coordination, technical oversight, community engagement, or fundraising. 
• When should you involve donors? Who are the most important donors? How might donors support with coordination of partners, implementation, or dissemination?

Once you have identified and mapped key stakeholders, you must agree on a shared vision. Ensure equitable involvement of stakeholders at key milestones, adopting principles of co-design and using participatory approaches. For support with this, see the HCD and Community Engagement tools.

Step 2: Diagnose your situation - using models

In this step, you will identify key challenges, communities and children most at risk, the drivers behind the issues they face, and the elements that could be leveraged as part of the solution.

To begin, you need to collect, collate and analyse social and behavioural evidence, including community insights. We highly recommend selecting a model to structure your research. Check out this document to learn about different models you could use.

The evidence collected will help you to:    
   -    Empathize with the affected population    
   -    Situate the problem within larger systems    
   -    Understand the barriers impeding positive change and determine which should be addressed first    
   -    Identify positive levers for change    
   -    Explore what is currently being done to address the issue and any previous initiatives    
   -    Decide which stakeholders should lead the response to this issue, especially players in government and civil society    
   -    Mobilize resources and prioritize where to invest them    
   -    Determine whether your strategies will continue to be effective as barriers shift    
 

Collecting social and behavioural evidence can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Before collecting new data, first consider the data you already have. If the desk review does not provide recent or thorough insights on the challenge you are working on, you will need to conduct primary research.     
There are several research methodologies you can use to fill in gaps in your understanding. The ‘Collecting Social and Behavioural Evidence’ tool provides an overview of six common methodologies, including when and why they are useful: (i) individual and collective interviews, (ii) observations, (iii) human-centred design (HCD) research, (iv) social mapping, (v) surveys, (vi) experimentation. It also provides guidance on how to triangulate data and which research method(s) to choose, based on your context and needs.

After collecting and compiling your social and behavioural evidence, you are ready to start diagnosing the situation. This is your opportunity to sift through all the data you have collected and find clarity in the noise. The goal of this process is to identify the root causes of the challenge(s). Dedicating time to this process will help you build more efficient solutions that are designed specifically to benefit the people we intend to serve. To guide you through this process, the ‘Diagnosing the situation’ tool outlines four clear steps and methods to: (i) organize your evidence, (ii) identify themes, (iii) collate and prioritize insights and (iv) develop problem and opportunity statements. You may need to use more than one of these methods, especially if the strategy covers multiple sectors or issues within a sector.

Problem and opportunity statements can act as guides during the solution phase. You can refer to them at different moments to ensure that the programme remains rooted in the local situation. A good statement frames the challenge or opportunity from the perspective of the impacted community.

A good statement should include: 

• The context    
• The people affected     
• The desired social or behavioural change    
• The barriers or enablers to change  

In ___place__ , the ___people____ find ___behaviour___ difficult to complete because __reason__.    
In ___place__ , the ___people____ face ___social issue___ because __reason__.    
In ___place__ , the ___asset____ could help overcome ___issue___ because __reason__.    
 

When you have developed your problem and opportunity statement(s), consider which aspects of the solutions are likely to require supply, services or policy interventions that rely on other players to implement. While SBC experts play a key role in designing services, systems and policies, sectoral teams (in ministries and organizations such as UNICEF) typically lead on these aspects. Now is the time to involve them if you have not already.

Once you have clarity on who should be leading what, you can move on to Step 3.  

Step 3: Perform a reality check 

Before embarking on a journey to develop an SBC Strategy, be sure to assess your existing resources. Check in on the status of existing plans, timelines, funds, technical staff and in-house SBC expertise.

Before developing your SBC Strategy, consider the following questions: 

1. Is leading the SBC strategy process within your mandate?   
2. Are there existing SBC plans or strategies that can help solve the challenges you’ve identified?
3. Is there evidence, particularly local evidence, to back up existing strategies?
4. At the present moment, does your initiative have the right buy-in from key stakeholders? Political authorities? Community representatives?
5. Have you adequately captured what communities in your priority areas think and feel about the problem and opportunities you have identified?
6. Does your design process allow creative and innovative solutions that go beyond raising awareness and providing information?
7. Is your strategy likely to get funded, or are funding mechanisms in place to support it?
8. Are there multiple partners trying to do the same thing?
9. Do you have coordination mechanisms in place?
10. Do you have mechanisms allowing you to continuously listen to and engage with the communities with whom you are working?

By answering these questions, you can decide whether the best course of action is to update an existing strategy or develop a new one. If the most important conditions are in place, you can move on to Step 4!

Step 4: Look for funding mechanisms and opportunities

Many SBC strategies remain unfunded for years after development. Funding can take a long time to materialize, so it’s important to start thinking about it early. The cost of your strategy will vary depending on your context and needs. To assess whether you have the necessary funding, answer the following questions:

• How much funding will you need to solve the problems identified in Step 1? While you haven’t identified any activities yet, try to make a rough estimate and ask around for opinions.
• What resources already exist for this work? Can they be easily accessed or reallocated?
• Do you have enough budget to cover the development of the strategy, including participatory processes with the communities you’re designing with?
• Does the budget for this strategy fit into existing national plans or objectives, with associated budgets, or is it a stand-alone approach?
• Are there any donors particularly interested in the thematic area or country you are working in?
• Do you foresee any budgetary constraints?

Use this budgeting tool as a guide for costs and funding sources for SBC solutions.

Phase II: Design, development and testing

At this point, you’ve collected and analysed your data to reach a better understanding of the situation. You have identified who is most affected by these challenges and might even have some ideas on how best to influence change. You have considered existing plans, thought through your ideal team and considered available funding mechanisms. Now, how do you solve the puzzle? 

Step 5: Outline the needs of affected groups 

Because you have limited time and resources, it’s important to be very clear about who is most at risk and who you are going to engage. This step prepares you to design tailored solutions with an exercise that places you in the shoes of these affected people. Spend some time re-analysing the data you have collected and consider who and where the most vulnerable people are. While you may encounter more than one vulnerable group, try to focus on no more than three.

Divide these groups into primary, secondary and tertiary levels:

• Primary groups are those most affected by the challenges, who will benefit most from social change or whose change in behaviour is considered most important. These are the people in your problem and opportunity statements, who can provide innovative local solutions.
• Secondary groups directly influence the primary group.
• Tertiary groups indirectly influence the primary group.

Once you have identified your groups, you can learn more about them by creating personas, daily journeys or both.

Start by reconnecting with your findings. Gather all the materials you have collected and go through them again, methodically. The goal is to reach a deep understanding of the people you met or read about.  What are their experiences? What are their beliefs? What are they asking for? You may find new details emerge that didn’t in Step 1.

After reviewing your social and behavioural evidence, you can organise your findings on the primary groups by using two key templates:

• A persona: This tool is used to represent the people for whom we are trying to find solutions. To arrive at an effective, tailored solution, you must understand their lives, routines, beliefs, motivations, experiences and attitudes towards the problem you are trying to solve. You must understand where their trust, skills, capacities, interests and knowledge lies. The Persona Template will help you organise all the information you have gathered. If you are struggling to complete the Persona due to gaps in understanding, consider conducting more focused group discussions or participatory activities.
• A Journey Map: This tool charts the experiences and emotions, both positive and negative, that someone experiences on a typical day, or along their journey to accomplish a particular task. A Journey Map could focus on activities like registering a child, going to school, or visiting a health clinic. This Journey Map Template will help you understand the barriers that arise and how the person feels at each stage of the journey. This exercise will help you choose the right interventions to address specific barriers. Though the example provided is of a health service, you can tailor your journey map to the specific service or behaviour you are addressing.

Creating Personas   
A Persona is a useful tool to model, summarize and communicate research about people. While it is a fictional representation of a person within your priority group, it allows us to understand them as holistic people, as opposed to just mothers, fathers, influencers or frontline workers. Personas bring out the  nuances and details that might be hidden in purely numeric data. For example, we might find two mothers with the same demographic profile (age, ethnicity, religion) but very different experiences and capacities related to the issues we are trying to solve. 

How to create personas:

• Use your research from Steps 1 and 2 to build one persona for each group of people that shares similar backgrounds, experiences, beliefs and needs. You should end up with a few different personas (at least three) to represent the people in your context.
• Give each persona a fictional name, so that the information cannot be traced back to any specific people.
• Fill out the Persona Template. Remember that this is a starting point, and you should tailor the questions to suit your needs.

Refer to these Personas to build a strategy that meets the specific needs of the people most affected by the challenges you are seeking to solve.

Creating Journey Maps: 

People have complex lives that lead to even more complex choices.  A visual Journey Map helps you see and understand key emotions, influences, perceptions and micro behaviours that arise throughout an experience. Journey Maps provide insight into when and why barriers emerge, and can help to create focused, strategic interventions that are more likely to succeed.

How to create a Journey Map:

• Use the information from your research to map a person’s journey, highlighting the barriers and challenges they face as they access a service or go about their day. Create as many journeys as you need to represent the variety of experiences you found in your research. You might have one per persona, but not always. Try to keep the number manageable.
• Fill out the Journey Map template based on the journeys you uncovered in the field.
• While it is ideal to work from several Journey Maps, a single Journey Map can greatly improve a strategy’s ability to address specific barriers and challenges.

Step 6: Select SBC approaches

Once you have diagnosed the situation from the perspective of the affected people and communities and situated your strategy within their context, you can now select suitable SBC approaches. As you select your approaches, consider the objective of your strategy and how you will achieve the desired change.        
Finding a single approach to achieve your social and behavioural objectives is rare. You will likely need multiple Social and Behaviour Change approaches to manage the complexity of human behaviour. Social change can be even more complex and systemic. Keep in mind that sharing information and raising awareness cannot uproot systemic issues and bring about lasting social and behavioural change.         
UNICEF takes an ecological approach to influencing behaviours and societies, addressing individual, social and environmental determinants. Selecting the right blend of approaches at each level will depend primarily on the nature of the challenges, their root causes and the context in which you are working. Secondary factors such as available evidence, costs, human resources and time may also come into play. This Programme Guidance divides the SBC approaches into the following seven broad categories:

• Community Engagement: Partnering with communities so they can lead the change process
• Social and Behaviour Change Communication: Designing holistic and data-driven communications to enable change
• Service Improvements: Designing services that are accessible, usable and valuable
• Supportive Public Policies: Changing the rules to enable positive change
• Systems Strengthening: Strengthening sectoral systems to achieve SBC objectives
• Applied Behavioural Science: Shaping contexts and designing processes and products to enable behaviour change
• Social Movements: Supporting and nurturing social change processes

Your SBC strategy will include a combination of approaches guided by the evidence you’ve collected. These approaches should directly address the causes of the challenges you seek to solve. While there is no combination of approaches that can be applied to all contexts and challenges, a problem-solving mindset will always be useful and applicable.         
For help, refer to the ‘Selecting SBC approaches’ tool, which includes guiding questions to help you make your decision.

Step 7: Develop a Theory of Change 

After identifying the approaches necessary to solve your problem, you need to bring them together into a Theory of Change (ToC). This will serve as a visual map of the journey to change, explaining the logic behind each intervention and how they come together to bring about change.         
It will also structure your results at various levels and guide which variables need to be tracked and measured.

In other words, the ToC will represent your entire strategy and its raison d’etre on one diagram.

You can find examples of ToCs in the Results Selection tool and UNICEF's Results Based Management (RBM) handbook.        
Theoretical models will help you structure your ToC. By using models like the socio-ecological model and the behavioural drivers model, you can ensure that your ToC takes every factor into account (see Why people do what they do). You should also consider the barriers identified in the Journey Maps developed in Step 5.

The ToC is a powerful tool for communicating the essence of the strategy to partners in a concise and coherent way. It ensures that you have captured the complexity of the situation and addressed all its causes. It also will help manage the implementation process.

Tip: It is important to socialize the ToC with the core steering committee or advisory group established in Step 3 to confirm all factors have been included.

Step 8: Define results and select interventions 

Now that you are armed with evidence, analysis, a strong human-centred process and a Theory of Change, it is time to develop your results and interventions. At this stage, you will:

1. Define the main objectives, indicators and targets for your SBC Strategy. Your overall objective is the problem you are trying to solve (defined in Step 2). You should define 3-5 major outcomes which will lead to the achievement of this objective. These outcomes should already exist in your Theory of Change. If not, adjust your ToC to include them. Your goal is to formalize the wording of the result, the indicators you will use to measure progress, the target change and your methods for tracking progress.
2. Define the social and behavioural outputs, indicators, and targets for each participating group you have identified. This will help capture how the change with each group contributes to the outcomes you have defined. Your interventions will largely focus on achieving these outputs, so it’s important to define them accurately and be as specific as possible.

For guidance on selecting results, see the Results Selection tool and UNICEF's Results Based Management (RBM) handbook. Remember: there is no such thing as a final strategy. When defining these measures for success, you need to leave room for your strategy to adapt. Measurement is also key to improving implementation, adjusting interventions and replicating or scaling them. After finalizing your programmatic and social/behavioural objectives, you are ready to select your engagement tactics to achieve the objectives you identified in Step 6. 

Below is a non-exhaustive list of some of the most common tactics, described in the following practical how-tos:

• Social Listening: Taking the pulse of public opinion and responding to rumours
• Digital Engagement: Using technology to connect and interact with people
• Feedback and Accountability Systems: Improving services and governance with communities
• Behavioural Insights: Applying and testing solutions inspired by behavioural science
• Social Norms: Understanding, addressing and leveraging unwritten rules
• Campaigning: Designing impactful multi-channel communication efforts
• Edutainment: Leveraging popular edutainment for a cause
• Community Networks: Strengthening local systems and leveraging trusted partners
• Media Partnerships: Working with the media to reach communities
• Private Sector Partnerships: Harness private sector brands and resources for change
• SBC in the Humanitarian Cycle: Using the Community Engagement in Humanitarian Action Toolkit
• M&E in Emergencies: Measuring change in times of crisis
• Capacity of Partners: Creating SBC expertise within government, CSOs and academic institutions
• Health Systems Strengthening: An example of integrating SBC into a sector
• Social Service Workforce: Understanding how frontline workers can protect children and vulnerable groups

Tip: Activities should be appropriate, desirable, effective, viable, practical, equity-focused and feasible for all participating groups. Before designing new solutions, try to leverage local role models, work with early adopters of the desired change and present alternatives that already exist within the community or similar communities.

Once you have decided on your combination of interventions, select a few process indicators to help you understand the implementation of your activities: their reach, coverage and quality. Add these process measures to the objectives identified above, to create your basic monitoring plan.        
 

Step 9: Determine the budget, timeline, risks and roles 

First, you must cost the strategy and identify budget sources.

Accurate costing is key to the success of any strategy. Developing a comprehensive budget that considers the entire cycle (from formative research to evaluation) is imperative to ensure results.

Activity-based costing (intervention by intervention) is a good, general approach. This type of operational budget identifies costs in sufficient detail for any single activity, allowing you to plan resource mobilization overall or by specific activity. This can be used by others to understand the cost to replicate or adapt an intervention to a different context.        
Costs are very context-specific. The process of budgeting requires a strong understanding of costing for each geography. Work with implementing partners and stakeholders on the ground to set realistic estimates.

It is important that your budget facilitates high quality work. Thorough research and professional design, marketing and entertainment is expensive. It may be tempting to present the minimum cost of your strategy to make it more desirable to potential funders. However, setting an insufficient budget may jeopardize your strategy’s chances of success. It is important to be realistic.

You should also consider the funds you already have. If you don’t have enough money yet, you should identify opportunities and develop a plan to mobilise resources. Your fundraising ambitions should be realistic. You may uncover additional funding by:

• Reallocating from existing budgets
• Joint funding with other departments or across ministries or UN agencies
• Integrating your strategy into already funded initiatives
• Fundraising (public or private) for specific interventions within the strategy or for the strategy as a whole

More guidance on developing your budget is available here.

Once you have established a budget, you can develop a timeline for the solutions.

What would you like to achieve in six months? A year? Two years? Here are some things to consider when developing your timeline:

• Which activities will have the most impact if completed first? Is there a logical order of the activities based on your ToC?
• What is the availability of key organizations, individuals, community members, service providers, etc.?
• Do you anticipate any delays in procurement, fund transfers, administrative processes, etc.?
• What do local calendars loom like, including seasonal variability in economic activities, cultural and religious events, etc.?
• How long will it take to gather key partners or steering committee members for field visits?
• What are key milestones for the overall strategy and by when do they need to be achieved?

Tip: it can be helpful to include buffer time in the estimated duration of each intervention, to account for initiation delays, adjustments and unexpected difficulties (see risk analysis below)

After establishing a timeline, you must consider the risks.

At this stage, take a step back and try to envision all the potential negative events (internal and external) that might affect your ability to achieve the intended objectives. For each negative event, use a simple scale to estimate how likely it is to arise and how serious its impact on the strategy would be. For high-impact and/or high-probability risks, you should articulate mitigation measures to prevent, minimize and respond to these events.

After you have assessed the risks, you may now assign roles and responsibilities.

Use your ToC, list of interventions, timeline and budget to map all the tasks required to manage and implement your strategy. Check in with colleagues to see if any important tasks are missing. You may need to assign roles and responsibilities to different organizations and people. To do this, decide who is best placed to:

• Manage and lead the implementation of the strategy (overall and for specific parts)
• Support the implementation of the strategy (overall and for different approaches and interventions)
• Which community organizations, representatives or members need to be involved, and when?
• What responsibilities will other stakeholders want to adopt or share?
• Within an organization, who can help move the process forward? Do they have the time and mandate to support it in the short and long term? What other responsibilities do they have that may conflict with their ability to support?
• Who has the appropriate experience, expertise, reach and influence?
• What kind of relationships exist between different stakeholders, and how do these relationships influence their willingness and ability to fulfil certain responsibilities?
• Who absolutely needs to be involved in the steering committee or implementation for political and local buy-in?
• Do you need to bring in donors at a certain stage?

Phase III: Implementation, monitoring and evaluation

Step 10: Baseline assessment

In order to assess your progress, you need to know your starting point.          
In Step 8, you outlined the specific results you are trying to achieve. To represent these results, we need quantifiable indicators. Once you have assigned a numeric value to your end point, you need to do the same for your starting point or baseline. To establish a baseline, you will most likely conduct surveys to set a baseline, developing questionnaires and sampling populations in your areas of focus. This information will allow you to set statistically representative measures of the factors that drive or prevent change, enabling you to track your progress. M&E specialists or other colleagues with expertise in statistics can help you design appropriate surveys. To create an adequate survey, they will need to understand your ToC and result framework. Your tracking efforts should focus on capturing intermediary results rather than just activities monitoring or the quantification of the prevalence/incidence of focus behaviours or social norms.

Step 11: Test and iterate 

It is critical to assess the impact of your activities to ensure they are:

• Accepted by the local community
• Effective in achieving your behavioural objective(s)
• Reaching your target groups
• Sustainable

Once you have developed an SBC Strategy or Plan, you must now assess its impact.  Testing and measurement are essential, as they will give you a clear understanding of what interventions worked and how well they worked. These two pieces of information help to determine which interventions are worth investing in and scaling up. 

U.S. food policy is a prime example of the importance of testing. In 2011, U.S. policy-makers were looking for strategies to curtail overwhelming rates of obesity. They believed that if consumers were aware of how many calories were in a Big Mac or a Coke, they would alter their food preferences and select healthier options. Based on this belief, they introduced a nationwide policy mandating fast food restaurants post the calorie content of their menu items.        
However, scientists found that this made no difference in US consumers' eating habits.  In fact, customers were actually consuming more calories in one sitting than ever before.

This mistake could have been easily avoided with testing. Using data and testing to develop your SBC Strategy will help to determine whether it has its intended impact and is worth the financial cost, or whether it potentially causes more harm than good.

There are a variety of testing options to evaluate the impact of your interventions.You could  run a pre-post experiment, an A/B test or a randomized controlled trial in a laboratory or in the field. Each option has strengths and weaknesses, and your approach will depend largely on the resources (finances, expertise, time) available. 

Before designing your test, you will need to clarify the following:

• What is your research question?
  • e.g., Do people eat unhealthy food after sad movies?
• What is your independent variable (a variable that remains constant and is not changed by other variables you are trying to measure)?
  • e.g. Sad movie
• What is your dependent variable (a variable that depends on other factors)?
  • e.g. Food selection
• Who is the affected population? What is the inclusion or exclusion criteria?
  • e.g. Adults 25+ living in Georgia, excluding people with diabetes or other medical conditions that alter eating habits
• What is your minimum required sample size?
  • e.g. Because we have three conditions, we will need 100 participants/group for a moderate effect size.
• What are your control and experimental conditions?
  • e.g. Control = Watch a neutral movie, examine what cafeteria food selection post-movie
  • Treatment 1 = Watch a sad movie, examine cafeteria food selection post-movie
  • Treatment 2 = Watch a happy movie, examine cafeteria food selection post-movie
• What are your outcome measures?
  • e.g. Rating participants’ feelings from sad to happy on a 7-point Likert scale
  • e.g., Number of slices of cake, fries, onion rings or other pre-defined unhealthy options on the tray

Be sure to collect participants’ demographic information for sub-analyses. You should also implement attention-check strategies throughout the experiment to ensure testing quality.        
Once you have gathered data on the performance of your intervention, you can determine whether and how to scale it up. You may want to iterate or refine your tactics based on the data you have gathered. You should use your test results to finalize your tools and approaches.

Step 12: Develop a plan for continued learning and iteration

Iteration assumes a learning mindset. Ongoing improvements and adjustments to the project design based on new data is an expected and central part of strategy development. We measure, learn and adapt through a regular cycle of rapid feedback and adjustments. Each cycle gets us closer to solutions that are better positioned to solve the challenges our programmes take on. This also ensures that solutions receive regular and significant input from the people they intend to support, before they are  implemented at scale. Complex behavioural and social problems can benefit immensely from an iterative approach. Use the Measure, learn and adapt tool to develop a plan for continued learning to improve your strategy.        

SBC Strategy Template

Guidance on filling out the SBC Strategy/Plan template