Development Media International

About Business Network

Development Media International (DMI) is a UK-based non-profit organisation that specialises in running evidence-based media campaigns to change behaviours and improve lives in developing countries.

We work with whichever media channels are most effective at reaching our target audience. Often that means radio, but we also use television, and we are starting to work with mobile phones.
Much of our work has been focused on health (including maternal and child survival, family planning, tuberculosis and neglected tropical diseases), but we also work on other issues (such as early childhood development).
Recently we have focused on sub-Saharan Africa, but we have worked across the developing world, with extensive experience in Asia and Latin America, and we are interested in working in those regions again.
Two factors make us different from other ‘behaviour change communication’ organisations:
1. Saturation
We apply a basic principle of commercial marketing that is often forgotten in social marketing: the importance of saturation (reach and frequency). Media campaigns will only be effective if they reach the majority of the target audience, even those in remote areas, and if they reach them often enough to drive home the key messages and calls to action. All of our campaigns are designed to maximise saturation.
2. Evidence (science)
There is little evidence that media campaigns are effective at changing behaviours in developing countries. We believe that media behaviour change campaigns should be seen as legitimate social interventions in their own right, but this will only happen if they can prove that they work. We have developed a robust set of tools to measure impact and generate evidence, including the first randomised controlled trial to show that a media campaign has changed health behaviours in a developing country (on child survival), and a second RCT (on family planning).
Of course, a third element is needed: compelling stories that strike a chord with the audience and convince them to change their behaviours.
Taken together, we describe these three elements (saturation, science and stories) as our Saturation+ methodology for changing behaviours at scale. We have proved that this unique approach works. We believe that well-designed and properly executed media campaigns are one of the most cost-effective channels for achieving population-level behaviour change (and we have the tools to prove that they work). We are now focused on scaling this approach to countries across the developing world.

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