SMART Communication Plan

Each student will be creating a SMART Communication Plan as the first step in their strategic plan. Your SMART objectives will be unique to your particular components for your campaign. 

1. Specific: What will change for Whom? Try to define your ideal behavior change and your target audience as much as possible. It is much easier to reach an audience if you know exactly who every member of the audience is. It is also much easier to demonstrate behavior change if you operationalize that change in a very precise and measurable way.

• Measurable: Now that you have decided on a measurable behavior change, How exactly will you conduct the measurement? What baseline measurements will you use to see if there has been change? How exactly will you quantify change? Will your measurement be qualitative or quantitative? Are there ways to get empirical measurements, or will you have to rely on self-reporting?

• Attainable or Achievable: Can the audience adopt this change, and can they adopt it in the time and with the resources available? This is where you should use a theoretical model to outline how your audience can change. Use your model to predict what the outcome will be and what kind of intervention you should use. In addition, look for research about how the desired change has been shown in the target audience. If you have not used the library’s online search functions before, they have tutorials on their website. We will go over this in class on Wednesday as well. You must go the literature for this step! You cannot come up with these answers on your own; you need sources to back you up. What kinds of resources would be needed for this to happen? Remember, we are working with theoretical budgets in class, but I would like for you to think about the kinds of resources you would need, even if you don’t really know what they would cost.

• Realistic: What kind of impact on health will this have? Is it possible for the target audience to make this change? What kinds of barriers do we foresee? Again, go to the literature and look for research that has outlined barriers and motivators for you target audience in this behavior change. It is fine to anticipate barriers based on our own knowledge of the topic, but it is much stronger to read about the barriers that others have documented.

• Time: How long will it take for our audience to adopt this change? What are the logical answers, and what does the literature have to say about this? Does the literature have answers about how many contacts or cycles of the Stages of Change model lead to successful behavior change? For example, we know that quitting smoking is not a one-time thing, people usually try to quit several times before they are successful. Given the nature of the behavior, when should we launch the campaign? Is there literature about this? If we are looking for sustained lifestyle change, how long will our time frame be for collecting data? For example, how long does someone have to keep lost weight off for it to be considered successful weight loss? What does the literature say about this? 

What Media and Channel do you anticipate using?

Using BEHAVE model, are there any holes in your plan that you will still want to address? Are there any assessments that you would like to do that are not addressed in the literature?

Using the ecological model, are there any up-stream interventions that would also be important to provide support and eliminate barriers at the policy level? While you may not be creating these interventions, it is important to evaluate these kinds of needs.

Try to find at least one source for each section of your SMART plan. We want to use the literature as much as possible, having a plan that is based in research is much more likely to be successful and use resources wisely. Please cite or footnote your sources in text, and provide an APA style reference page at the end of your document. All of your sources should come from peer reviewed journals, or government documents or websites. 

 Four sources is the minimum requirement. You should already have sources from your White Paper.