CDCynergy Overview Transcript

Welcome to CDCynergy. You're invited to explore and use this interactive tool that helps you plan and evaluate effective health communication efforts. Let's look at the steps we'll follow to do that.

The CDCynergy process is divided into six phases.

The first two phases use epidemiology to help define, describe, and understand health problems that may need a public health intervention, including communication.

Phases three and four help identify and characterize intended audiences. Also in these phases, you'll design communications to reach and influence audiences based on your communication goals.

The fifth phase focuses on planning a comprehensive evaluation of the development, execution, and effects of your intervention activities.

Finally, Phase six offers guidance on ways to execute and maintain your intervention and evaluation activities. This phase also helps you consider the lessons you've learned from these activities.

In Phase one, Describe the Problem, you'll use descriptive epidemiologic methods to define and describe the health problem that may become the focus of interventions. This phase will also guide you through situational analyses that assess factors that may effect direction. These factors include funding, work that other agencies have underway, and other issues often taken for granted in the planning process.

In Phase two, Analyze the Problem, you'll use analytic epidemiologic methods to identify the determinants of the problem described in phase one. Once you have delineated the direct and indirect causes of these problems, you'll be guided through a process of deciding the most promising way to intervene on these causal factors

In Phase three, Plan the Intervention; you'll determine whether communication will play dominant and/or supportive roles in your intervention activities. In this phase, you'll conduct research with intended audiences and assess whether you have audience segments large enough and different enough to justify unique communication activities for them. You'll also use audience research to develop audience profiles to help tailor communication activities to specific audience characteristics.

In Phase four, Develop the Intervention, you'll use the audience profiles from the previous phase to guide you in testing, developing, and selecting concepts, messages, settings, channel specific activities, and materials that strategically reach and influence your intended audience.

In Phase five, Plan the Evaluation, you'll engage stakeholders to determine their information needs. You'll then formulate an evaluation plan and reporting system that meets those information needs in a timely manner. You'll also insure that agreements are in place to protect people who participate in evaluation activities.

In Phase six, Implement the Plan, you'll wrap up your planning efforts and execute both your intervention and evaluation activities. You'll also consider lessons learned and disseminate your experience and evaluation findings, so that others can benefit from them.

CDCynergy is the guiding theme for this tool, because synergy refers to situations in which multiple parts interact to improve the whole. The key to an effective health communication effort is for planners and evaluators to understand how each phase in the process links to the other five phases and how some activities within phases can occur simultaneously.

Although CDCynergy will take you through communication and evaluation processes one step at a time, you should always be thinking ahead --keeping in mind that each decision you make in one phase will effect decisions you make in other phases.

We hope you'll enjoy using CDCynergy as a helpful tool and partner in your planning and evaluation efforts.