Identify and develop the message you want to communicate.
Consider your objectives and audience when developing the messages you want to communicate. Once you have developed your communication objectives and learned about your audience, you can begin to make decisions about the focus and content of your messages based on this knowledge.
Some questions to consider and some suggestions for message creation include:
Q: Are the people in your audience aware of the health issues you are addressing in your communications, and what do they know?
If not, and if knowledge is incorrect or limited consider messages that:
Q: Do they believe they are at risk and that the consequences of not acting are serious?
If not, consider messages that:
Q: Do your employees see a personal return on investment for changing their behavior? What benefits and disadvantages do they see in paying attention to your communications and following their recommendations?
If not, consider messages that:
Q: Do they believe they can change their health behavior, and do they have the skills?
If not, consider messages that:
Q: Do they think they have the support they need (at work and at home) to change their behavior?
If not, consider messages that:
Once you have a clear idea of what you want to communicate in your messages, you can either look for existing communication materials or develop your own.
Review existing materials
Start by seeing what already exists that you can use or adapt for your employees. A range of diabetes and other relevant resources are available at:
Develop and test messages and materials
Sometimes you may need messages and materials to address your specific objectives and audiences so you will need to develop and test your own (in-house or through communication agency) or partner with other organizations to do this. You may be able to get help from your organization’s marketing or education departments or from groups in your community that specialize in health promotion. Community-based health organizations, health education professional organizations, and schools of public health or communication are often interested in partnering with worksites to develop health communication programs. Example include local chapters of the American Diabetes Association, American Association of Diabetes Educators, Society for Public Health Education, and Schools of Public Health.
Whether you develop materials in-house or partner with an outside organizations, you will want to make sure the messages and materials developed are:
Test the ideas you have for messages and materials (concept testing) with some of the employees to see if you’re going in the right direction. When you have draft messages and materials, pretest them with a sample of employees.
More detailed information about how develop messages and materials and carry out concept testing and pretesting is available in Making Health Communication Programs Work.