University-community partnership for co-creating a framework to increase adoption of evidence-based public health policies

Introduction: Important public health victories have resulted from legislation, heightened regulatory environments, and litigation. This achievement has raised the relevance of community action coalitions, especially in regards to policy advocacy, community organization, and communication. However, coalitions lack a systematic framework with which to select and tailor evidence-based policies for local adoption. Methods: Since December 2010 a university-community partnership has embarked on alpha testing a marketing driven, systematic, planning framework, Community Based Policy Making and Marketing (CBPM-squared), a 3-tiered, 8-step process to help coalitions select and promote evidence-based policy change. Coalition members not only select policies to promote, but also learn techniques for gaining insights into factors that influence how policy beneficiaries, stakeholders, and decision makers view policy change. These insights enable coalitions to modify policy elements and frame issues to build common ground, optimize support, and influence decision makers. Results: Favorable measures of coalition collective efficacy to employ CBPM-squared and perceptions of local control reflect co-creative aims. Reinforcing a “marketing mindset,” accelerating achievement of steps, engaging partners in key tasks, and monitoring tendencies to focus on “programs” versus “policies” are critical results in evaluating framework utility. Discussion: The framework uniquely blends many current theory-practice processes in public health to address barriers to dissemination of evidence-based policies including lack of criteria for systematically selecting and tailoring them, building advocacy skills, and monitoring and evaluating policy implementation. It also addresses the need for improving dissemination of policy evaluation results, thereby enabling policy analysts to assess political feasibility and impact.