Christopher H. Cooke on "How to Approach this Disk"

The social marketing version of CDCynergy is a fantastic tool that has a variety of resources for planning, developing, and evaluating the social marketing program and users from beginner to advanced will find something here to help them develop a social marketing program. In our formative research, we did identify some suggestions or some approaches to using CDCynergy that will make it easier to navigate all the resources that are on the disk.

The first thing we’d like users to remember is that CDCynergy is a model of a rather complex planning process. The model itself is laid out in sequential phases and steps that allows the user to proceed through them in an orderly fashion, but the process itself is never really sequential as most planners know. In fact, it’s more of an iterative process where in planning you move from forward and backwards sometimes to revisit earlier decisions. So the suggestion that we have for users is to remember that even though the process itself is laid out sequentially and simply, it does try to capture a very complex process and, in that sense, it doesn’t really lend itself to moving in one direction only.

The new user should go through all of the phases and scroll down and review all of the steps underneath each phase just so they have a sort of a big picture or an overview of what’s there so they know sort of what’s available, and that will also help them decide where they need to start in terms of using the tool if they’re not going to start at the beginning.

Most users will probably come to the social marketing version of CDCynergy somewhere in the middle of a planning process that they may have already started, and that’s okay. The model recognizes that not all users are going to start at the very beginning and that some users may find themselves in phase 2 or phase 3. That’s fine, although we do recommend very strongly that if a user does enter the planning process in a point other than at the beginning, that they do go back and revisit the phases and steps that preceded the point where they entered the program just to make sure that they’ve captured everything that the model has. They might find some other steps or some other work to do that they hadn’t thought of before and would strengthen their own program.

There may be elements of this version of CDCynergy that are very appropriate for what the user is trying to do, and there may be other aspects of the planning process where the user prefers to use their own method or their own planning model; and, in that case, again it’s a judgment call that the user is in a position to decide which elements of the CDCynergy version they want to use and which elements of another model or other approaches that they’d want to use.

….the nice thing about the structure of the social marketing version of CDCynergy is it helps you navigate what is essentially a rather complex process in an orderly fashion. It helps you keep track of your work, makes sure that you’re on task, and you’re doing all the necessary steps so that when you get to the end you’ll have a program that you can implement and be satisfied with.

And I think the final point I’d like to make is that while this particular version of CDCynergy was developed with the public health user in mind, the model is generic enough that it can be used by people who are working on social justice issues or environmental issues, and they can substitute their own content into the planning model and find a productive tool that will help them develop their program.