Agents for Change

This paper addresses how Thompson Social, a communications group in India, assisted in effecting social change for millions of rural people in India. The article reviews the last seven years of lessons learned and reviews models for effecting change.

By effecting the lives of 700 million people in rural India, it is not possible to work on an individual level but rather with communities which share certain characteristics. One of the challenges is modifying the process of the social system so that members relearn how to perform their roles.

One of the functions that a change agent performs is establishing "a link between a perceived need of a social system, and a possible means of satisfying the need."The communications role is that of a facilitator and "solution builder" since it establishes contact between the client system and the source of a need satisfying service or product. The audience must determine the solution --- and the change agent must be receptive, have empathy and be able to identify with culturally difficult situations.

A number of models are outlined:

Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA):
In this model individuals stay in a village for several days and no structured interviews or group discussions are conducted. What is employed are techniques "like village mapping, time lines, resource mapping and wealth ranking" as a way of understanding motivations, needs and influences of people in the community. The PRA's have shown that villagers collect information and generate ideas better than outsiders.

The Know - Feel - Do model:
In this model the consumer becomes aware of a product, develops an idea about it and then buys the product or service. "This model is appropriate when the change being advocated is a major change for the audience, and is too radial to receive the support of the 'influencers' in a society."

The Do - Feel - Know model:
In this model an obstacle to effecting communication is recognised: the gap between knowledge and practice. The reasons are based on previous communication efforts under the Know - Feel - Do model which focused awareness about an issue but did not include "communicating a relevant benefit."

Part of the conclusion is "giving communication a powerful call to action, in getting the audience to follow the Do - Feel - Know sequence. The sequence addresses the alternative view of transformation that change in attitude is the consequence rather than the cause of behaviour change." This model also indicates that "demonstration" is an effective communication tool since the individual can see the benefit associated with the practice.

The author refers to several examples of communication projects that effected community change. One, a project that turned a routine immunisation session into a "festive" community event lasting over a week. Two, a darrohoeal disease programme which used a demonstration doll as part of a communication package which showed the processes of dehydration and rehydration.