Ensuring Impact: The Critical Role of RM&E in Strategic Communication
- sidunicef
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An Introduction to UNICEF's "Essentials for Excellence"
Strategic communication is essential for addressing public health threats and fostering resilient, informed communities. Success hinges on the rigorous application of research, monitoring and evaluation (RME) throughout every stage of an SBC initiative ensuring that interventions achieve the highest sustainable impact and deliver value for investment.
Why RME matters for Social and Behaviour Change
Evidence-Based Decision Making: RME ensures that SBC programmes are grounded in an accurate understanding of community needs, behaviours and enabling factors. Formative research provides baseline insights to tailor communication strategies to local realities and identify knowledge gaps and barriers.
Continuous Improvement: Monitoring processes track the implementation of planned activities, assess their reach, quality and stakeholder satisfaction and facilitate timely adjustments to maximize results. Early detection of progress or challenges enables corrective action and innovation throughout programme implementation.
Accountability and Impact: Rigorous evaluation measures the outcomes and impact of SBC initiatives, determining what difference the programme made, for whom and why. Evaluation approaches—whether outcome-based, impact-focused or using matched control groups—offer credible evidence to justify sustained support and guide future investments.
Application and Adaptation
Essentials for Excellence provides practical guidance adaptable to diverse SBC contexts, informed by global experience in pandemic preparedness, child protection, hygiene promotion and more. Tools and templates based on participatory approaches, equip users to collect quality data, analyze outcomes, and maximize learning—whether for government programmes, (I)NGOs initiatives or community-led efforts.
This summary is based on the 2008 UNICEF publication, "Essentials for Excellence: Researching, Monitoring and Evaluating Strategic Communication for Behaviour and Social Change." To explore this framework in detail, here is the full publication.
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