AI.COMM - Avian and Pandemic Influenza Resource Link

In most cases, messages and materials were created after
formative research was conducted. In other cases, such as the
West African countries of Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, and
Côte d’Ivoire, rapid communication assessments were undertaken
to determine communication capacity and identify gaps
in relating information on avian infl uenza during outbreaks.
The assessments revealed myriad hindrances: advocacy
challenges (e.g., uneven funding and implementation, diffi culty
sustaining attention on AI given the competing priorities of
key stakeholders), management challenges (e.g., a lack of
coordination within governments and among partners),
and technical challenges (e.g., uneven risk perception of AI,
misunderstanding of motivations for desirable disease prevention
and control behaviors). All of these fed into the design
of messages and materials that could address some of these
obstacles, such as making the case for taking avian infl uenza
outbreaks seriously and providing easy-to-understand, “do-able”
actions that the target audiences would not be discouraged by.
To evaluate the effectiveness of messages and materials,
AI.COMM created a question guide for communication
materials pretesting, and a separate questionnaire for
pretesting of messages.
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