1. Challenge and Focus: Social change and behaviour change are often characterized as not having hard, compelling evidence that demonstrates their direct impact on priority development issues. Two groups from whom we often hear this critique are national and international policy makers and funders. This often disrupts the possibility for people in our common field of work being significantly engaged in local, national or international planning and policy development and/or securing the resources required to work at the scale required. 
2. Purpose: To provide local, national and international policy makers and funder decision-makers with the compelling evidence they need, in the easily digestible bite sized chunks they require, to demonstrate that social change and behaviour change strategies and actions have a significant, positive direct impact on priority development challenges.
3. Work to date: We have taken the following steps (a) A journal literature identification process (b) Asking (and receiving from) research focused people and organisations in the social change and behaviour change field of work to nominate up to 10 pieces of research that they find most compelling and persuasive in demonstrating the direct impact of social change and behaviour change strategies related to development priorities (c) A review of the collection of impact research summaries on The CI platform - see this link and (d) From those three steps we identified 95 studies that meet the criteria that follow. Then we distilled those studies into their key points.
4. Criteria: The selection criteria for identifying the social change and behaviour change research and impact data set a very high bar in order to help ensure credibility with policy makers and funders (a) Only Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) with a researched population over 1,500 ... or ... (b) ... Systematic reviews that include some RCTs (c)Must be published in a peer review published journal (d) Primarily that publishing should be in the leading journals that have the highest credibility amongst funders and policy decision-makers and (e) the research must produce a sentence or phrase that contains a numeric, direct impact data point that can be quoted.
THE ONLINE PAGES THAT ARE THE FOCUS FOR THIS REVIEW ARE:
The review questions and comments opportunities follow. Many thanks for taking the time to do this - very much appreciated.

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* 1. Your name

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* 2. Your position

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* 3. Your organisation

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* 4. In what country do you work?

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* 5. Which country is your nationality?

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* 6. YOUR OVERALL ASSESSMENT - As you scroll through and review the research impact data organised by ISSUES and STRATEGIES (examples) what is your overall assessment, from your perspective, of the value of the data compiled and presented in this manner for your policy engagement  and funding initiatives?

Please choose a MAXIMUM of 3 of the options and use the comments box to explain your selection and add comments and questions.

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* 7. ASSESSMENT OF HOW THE POLICY MAKERS AND FUNDERS THAT YOU ENGAGE WILL VIEW THIS DATA - Please think of two or three policy makers and/ or funders that you know well. To the best of your knowledge how will they view the data presented - ISSUES and STRATEGIES in the style presented. 

Please choose a MAXIMUM of 3 of the options and use the comments box to explain your selection and add comments and questions.

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* 8. QUALITY AND CREDIBILITY OF THE DATA PRESENTED - As above the base criteria for selection were:
  • Relate to a Development issue;
  • Focused on the impact of a social change or behaviour change strategy or process;
  • Published in a high level peer review journal;
  • Methodology is an RCT or Systematic Review;
  • Results present as a numeric data point.
On either of the two pages - ISSUES and STRATEGIES please click on a few of the links.

In your view is the data presented (a) compelling and (b) credible for policy makers and funders?

Please CHOOSE TWO  only and use the comments box for further questions and comments.

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* 9. CONTENT FORMAT
When viewing this data from the perspective of your experience of engaging with policy makers and in policy fora and/or engaging and working with people who make funding decisions, what is your assessment of how the content is formatted - the attempt to be:
  • Very brief
  • Lead with the strategy
  • Highlight one or two key impact data points (with links to the relevant journal paper),
  • Identify context - eg country,
  • Highlight the methodology
  • State the journal and year? 
Please SELECT ONE ONLY from below and then provide review comments and suggestions in the box that follows.

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* 10. PAGE FORMAT
- Though this is a very draft design we wanted to get your assessment of the overall design of each page. These are templates as they can be edited and amended depending on the interests of Funders and Policy Makers - for example a "page" based on regions or specific countries; different pages for other Issues; the same for Strategies.

The overall concept is that Policy Makers and Funders can: 

  • Quickly get an overview of the weight of the social change and behaviour change high quality impact data for their priorities
  • Through the links they can directly access the core journal papers that produce this data.
There will be codes that support embedding the relevant pages in web sites.

Please choose a MAXIMUM of TWO only and use the comments box for further comments.

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* 11. Any other comments or contributions that you wish to make?

Many thanks for doing this review. If you are too limited by the space and questions above please do feel free to send me an email. Really appreciate you engaging in this initiative. Much strength for your very important work - Warren

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