Advocacy and the Media

• Make sure to include media owners, managers, media executives and other influential players in the media, in addition to journalists.
• Conduct a series of visits with this group of media representatives to initiate working relationship(s) with them and solicit their support for increased reporting on family planning. You can present the results of your stakeholder analysis to serve as basis for the support you are seeking from the media. It will also be important to present your planned family planning activities in the community and make recommendations on how the media can help make your project more effective.

• Select popular media organizations in your area (print, radio, TV and digital) and assess their health stories over a period of time. Look at both quantity (number) and quality (accuracy, depth) of the stories. This will give an overview of the health issues in your area and how the media is presenting them to the public.

• Determine which training topics are most essential to cover with the media in your area. After your stakeholder analysis, meetings with media representatives and the desk review, you will have a good idea of gaps and topics for which the media may need training. For example, they might be regularly sharing misinformation about long-acting contraceptive methods.
• Develop training modules on family planning as it relates to the media. Modules can include topics such as:
  • Effective reporting on family planning
  • Linking family planning to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
  • Family planning and economic development

Feel free to use or adapt the Effective Reporting of Family Planning: A Training Manual for Media Practitioners.

• Conduct the training with key media. For the training to be effective, include a range of media practitioners, including health reporters, education reporters, feature writers, on-air personalities and others.
• Maintain a database of trained journalists. For example, TCI conducted a 3-day training workshop on media advocacy for family planning to empower 125 media practitioners, social media influencers and information officers from relevant ministries, departments and agencies across TCI-supported states. The aim of the training was to (1) strengthen the ability of media practitioners in the states to effectively develop and disseminate accurate information on the benefit of family planning/child birth spacing to individuals, community and the state at large and (2) build the capacity of journalists, media reporters and producers to serve as family planning media advocates in the geographies. TCI state counterparts were then able to call upon these trained media representatives, drawing on a database they kept, to cover their family planning activities.

• You can take journalists on field trips to family planning facilities in the community to help with effective reporting on family planning. This will help expose the media to live situations and scenarios and will give them human-interest stories to use in their reports. Be sure to also invite photographers, to document the work visually.

• Identify a core person or a group of journalists who have keen interest in reporting family planning issues. You could also select one of these journalists as a your focal person, who can mobilize his/her colleagues as needed.
• Communicate with this person or group of people regularly about your project activities and any community or national family planning issues. With regular coverage of project activities, journalists’ knowledge on how to report on family planning issues will be further enhanced. This regular exposure will also help keep them up to date with the current trends, changes, facts and figures on family planning.
• Encourage media professionals to cover stories related to family planning on a regular basis through routine interviews with women who have benefitted from family planning interventions or services, as well as men, community leaders and others who support family planning. In Nigeria, partners worked with key media contacts to create opportunities for interviews and discussions with the Advocacy Working Group, family planning champions and project representatives. They also helped to popularize the “Get it Together” campaign.

• TCI developed a tool to monitor media coverage in Nigerian states and motivate journalists to track their family planning/AYSRH stories. 
• In your other advocacy activities, you will be monitoring government commitments, policies, budgets and family planning indicators. You can update the media on these developments and include them in training sessions, seminars, conferences, stakeholders’ forums and other related events. You can also include media representatives in your community advocacy activities.
• Encourage journalists to provide supplemental information to your policy and budget tracking. For example, journalists can visit health care facilities to obtain first-hand information and generate stories for news reports and documentaries.
• Help develop the capacity of media professionals to monitor budgets and track government’s spending on family planning. One way is to foster relationships between journalists and experts in budget monitoring and tracking who can provide insider information on whether or not the government is fulfilling its family planning commitments. You can do this by inviting the media to your Advocacy Working Group meetings in which you discuss budgets. You can then advocate for regular reporting on family planning budgets, and you can also encourage the media to advocate for production of budget documents for public access and distribution.