BCA 2024

The social issue

All children deserve access to a quality early learning programme. These programmes equip children with the necessary skills that form the foundations for learning, school performance, and overall life success. For lower-income groups access to affordable, quality education is often limited. The SmartStart programme is a systems solution to the challenge of delivering these early learning opportunities at scale.

The SCIENCE

Conducted a behavioural research study to understand the factors parents and caregivers consider when making learning-related decisions for the children.

The research findings outlined the barriers to making optimal decisions for their children and what caregivers understand about early learning in young children.

The INSIGHTS

Applied the behavioural insights of messenger effect, saliency, incentives, and social proof to inform content creation for the website, to facilitate better engagement of caregivers with the learning resources.

Applied the behavioural insights of the availability effect, saliency, personalisation and building social norms to achieve the aim of sharing the value of quality early learning to the caregiver audience and community influencers (i.e., nurses, chiefs, priests, doctors, et al).

The Intervention

The Behaviour Change Agency designed and implemented a targeted and focused campaign strategy to achieve SmartStart’s objectives incorporating the current SmartStart website as the campaign’s key information hub. As an agency for social marketing and behaviour change communication, BCA used our uniquely African BEST methodology to develop a comprehensive messaging framework, which was optimised for the different media channels.

After completing an audit of the existing SmartStart website, BCA implemented a set of changes that improved user experience on the website and created a more fluid experience on the ‘mobisite’.

BCA developed and designed a microsite, the Parent Space, as an information hub for all caregivers during the campaign (and beyond) to enable better engagement with SmartStart’s early learning resources, for example, how to facilitate successful early development and learning with their children and how to facilitate fluid interactions between parent/caregiver and an educator.

The content we developed was:

Clear and understandable.
Appropriately crafted to convey meaning and tone that were appealing to the intended audience.
Respectful to the target groups' different cultural backgrounds.

To increase community engagement, multiple channels were used, such as radio/Facebook/Moya, digital platforms like Google, mobile through WhatsApp, WhatsApp caregiver engagement and newsletters. Digital ads were used to convey evidence-based key messages around social issues related to early childhood development, and paid media ads were tailored to drive traffic to the website and improve website optimisation.

Simple and salient multilingual executions were proposed, with an option to translate the entire web page and the resources to a user’s mother tongue.

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The Impact

This behaviourally informed campaign focused on promoting equality in early childhood learning and education. The intervention was developed using results and recommendations from the mixed-methods primary research conducted with caregivers and ECD providers. Learnings from the implementation will form the basis of future campaigns.

SmartStart

Education: Early childhood development

Demand creation campaign for early learning and development

Services

The social issue

The challenge

The SCIENCE

The INSIGHTS

The Intervention

The Impact

The Impact