Using Evidence to Select Interventions

The social marketing process can help you tailor or adapt an existing intervention. Again, knowing your audience's barriers to change and what will motivate them can guide the adaptation of existing programs or materials. Formative research can provide details (e.g., how to reach participants, appropriate incentives) that may not come with a packaged intervention.

Thinking about the strategy decisions in this phase will help you identify any gaps in existing programs, if you choose to use them, which you'll need to account for with other program components. For example, you may find an existing program that addresses your audience's barriers and capitalizes on their motivators, but there may not be direction on appropriate places for the program or how to promote it.

Tip

Regardless of whether you create a new intervention from scratch or modify an existing one, pre-testing will be vitally important. See pre-testing section in phase 4 for more information.