Guidelines

On September 22, 2014, the Institute of Medicine’s Roundtable on Population Health Improvement held a workshop to discuss some of the science of health communication, audiences, and messaging, and to explore what it will take to generate widespread awareness, acceptance, and action to improve health, including through the entertainment media, the news media, and social media. This report summarizes the presentations and discussion of the workshop.

The document describes culturally relevant resources to plan and engage in suicide prevention programs, discusses safe messaging and social marketing, and illustrates suicide prevention materials from 19 American Indian communities in 11 states. An appendix provides American Indian and Alaska Native sources for materials on topics related to suicide, such as mental health, addiction, and depression. Although the title indicates this is for Californians, it is relevant for all parts of the nation.

The purpose of this workbook is to help public health program managers, administrators, and evaluators develop a joint understanding of what constitutes an evaluation plan, why it is important, and how to develop an effective evaluation plan in the context of the planning process. It is intended to assist in developing an evaluation plan but not to serve as a complete resource on how to implement program evaluation. Rather, it should be used along with other evaluation resources, such as those listed in the resource section of this workbook.

This tooklit covers understanding and integrating cultural identity, increasing youth engagement,  establishing partnerships, and evaluation when developing programs for youth violence prevention. While it focuses on aboriginal populations in Canada, much of the content also applies to youth empowerment initiatives with Native youth in the United States. 

Derived in part from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Research and Evaluation Conference in 2007, this resource addresses evaluation of communications campaigns, policy-oriented communications, and advocacy efforts.  The report offers information on the principles of evaluation, choosing your evaluation design, and overcoming the particular barriers that can arise with communication evaluation.

These web pages from Faces and Voices of Recovery provide “Recovery Messaging” training to help people in recovery from addiction and their families to speak publicly about their experiences in a way that helps build public support for people getting the help they need to recover.  Featured tip sheets and other resources offers guidance on working with the media, outreach to policymakers, public speaking, and other kinds of messaging. 

This resource from the Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development will help you create or adapt materials to ensure they are respectful of the cultural values, beliefs, and practices of the intended audience. 

The purpose of this workbook is to help public health program administrators understand what a “success story” is, why it is important to tell success stories, and how to develop success stories.

This paper examines how communication campaigns with different purposes (individual behavior change and policy change) have been evaluated. It offers a discussion of theories of change that can guide evaluation planning, along with five case studies of completed campaign evaluations. Each case study includes lessons learned from the evaluation, and the paper finishes with a set of cross-case-study lessons gleaned from these and other evaluations.

The recommendations in this manual detail how to safely memorialize someone who has died by suicide. These guidelines can be applied to online memorials and online messages about the deceased.