Good Intentions Need Good Marketing

Good marketing campaign is needed to popularize and sustain health programs.

For over six years, the Zuellig Family Foundation has been giving health leadership and governance capability-building programs to mayors and municipal health officers (MHOs) of its partner municipalities. The training has led local governments to come up with innovative health programs meant to improve health outcomes.

The challenge is in communicating the programs and making them sustainable. So ZFF decided to include a session to respond to mayors’ expressed need for assistance in ensuring their health and other social programs gain traction in their communities and become sustainable beyond their terms in office.

For the session entitled “How to Communicate the Vision?” ZFF invited veteran advertising executive and FCB general manager Ellen Samano, who gave the basic pointers on how to create and execute sustainable marketing campaigns. She also pointed out that running successful campaigns does not entail big budgets for as long as local leaders can identify a small core group composed of people who believe in the program objective, can do research, has creative ideas and lead the group.

Lessons learned from Samano’s talk were also applied during the next session, which was on “Diffusing Change in the Community and Sustaining Gains.” This was facilitated by University of the Philippines-Manila Assistant Professor Anthony Cordero M.D., who also reiterated some of the points given by Samano.

The seven municipalities included in the training module belong to ZFF’s “alumni” municipalities or those whose mayors and MHOs have completed ZFF’s program.