Social and Behavioral Change (SBC)

Communication for Behavioral Impact (COMBI) in Health and Social Development

An international course offered by the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy in association with the CUNY SPH Center for Systems and Community Design, the COMBI Institute, and the World Health Organization.

This 10-day course focuses sharply on communication planning for behavioral impact in health and social development as part of a program of Social and Behavioral Change. Behavioral results are viewed as the primary end-goals of health and social development programs. The course stresses that behavioral impact comes with effective communication programs purposefully planned for behavioral results, and not only directed at awareness creation, attitude change, advocacy, or public education. The private sector experience in successfully using Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) for consumer behavioral results points to an approach for achieving behavioral objectives in health and social development. The World Health Organization has been applying this IMC approach to a variety of desired health behaviors over the past 22 years in over 70 countries and refers to it as “COMBI” (Communication for Behavioral-Impact). UNICEF country offices in over 20 countries have been using the COMBI approach within its program communication and communication-for-development (C4D) efforts. UNFPA, UNEP, UN WOMEN and UNDP have also used the COMBI behavioral communication approach.

COMBI is not about producing posters and T-shirts and pamphlets. It applies in an integrated way the disciplines of community engagement, interpersonal counseling, personal selling, health education, mass communication, folk media, social media, marketing (including village-level marketing traditions), public relations and public advocacy, administrative mobilization, advertising, and market research – directed at achieving desired behavioral outcomes.

The course is intended for:
Health and social development professionals who have the responsibility for designing, supervising or managing health education/promotion/communication, information-education-communication (IEC) programs, and other strategic communication/social mobilization/program communication efforts to achieve specific behavioral results in health and social development.

Please see event website.