Building capacity of regional collaboratives to conduct social marketing campaigns

As a part of its broader nutrition education efforts, the Network for a Healthy California (previously Nutrition Network) established eleven regional collaboratives throughout California to engage local partners in policy work aimed at improving the nutrition and physical activity environments of surrounding low-income communities. These efforts, coined “nutrition education initiatives,” were to be based in education and supported by strong social marketing components aimed at communities, influencers, and policymakers in the hopes that policy and/or environmental change would be realized. Since their inception in January of 2004, the collaboratives have brought together thousands of partners throughout the state and have established themselves as regional nutrition and physical activity experts, securing both additional funding sources and strong media attention for their initiatives.

To help them in these efforts, the Network has provided a significant amount of strategic technical assistance in the areas of collaborative building and maintenance, media and communications, strategic planning, and research and evaluation. Now that five years have passed, the Network has conducted a critical examination of the technical assistance provided to these collaboratives and how it has lent to both their success and stumbles.

This session will review those findings, including the strengths, weaknesses and gaps, and discuss plans for future technical assistance. As establishing collaboratives and coalitions is a key strategy utilized by many health promotion programs, having an understanding of the type and quantity of technical assistance necessary to ensure successful collaborative social marketing campaigns is a critical program planning factor.