Listening for Change
Written By: Mark Weber, Director Office of Communications
Listening for Change was the theme of last week’s National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media* in Atlanta. The event drew over 1,000 attendees from across the country to discuss health communications and how areas such as social media, design thinking and transmedia storytelling are transforming the health communications landscape.
The need to listen is not a new idea but its relevancy and urgency have never been greater. In the federal government, the Open Government Initiative is founded on the pillars of transparency, collaboration and participation – all of which are reliant upon successful listening. Moreover, with tools like Twitter and Facebook making communications a 24/7 operation, listening provides many new challenges and opportunities.
At SAMHSA, we are embedding listening into everything we do. This week alone we have held three public advisory council meetings, all of which were broadcast live on the SAMHSA website. We have also initiated an open feedback forum to solicit feedback on SAMHSA’s working Definition of Recovery and its related Guiding Principles. In the first three days of the forum, we had nearly 200 individuals participate while submitting more than 180 separate ideas.
However, listening at SAMHSA not only involves the feedback that people provide on our website, it includes being present wherever people are offering their ideas and input. This means anything from being responsive on Twitter to questions from our followers to paying attention to people that, in their own words, are doing some mental health social media rabble rousing. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people” and the revolution in communications technology is opening welcome new avenues for public engagement.
If you have other ideas about how we can do a better job of paying attention to your feedback and ideas, let us know. We are listening.
*SAMHSA was a co-sponsor of the event along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Public Health Information Coalition (NPHIC) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
Thanks for referring back to my blog. I appreciate the support and also the scholarship to the conference. #opengov is awesome. I think “rabble rouser” is a compliment for sure. Pat Deegan calls herself a “disruptive innovator,” and she’s one of my heroes.
I think the very most important suggestion I made was that we need to have a national debate about the long term effectiveness of psych meds. The time has come that we seriously need to question our basic assumptions in an open, honest, rigourous, participatory, inclusive, evidence based manner. How can we make this happen?
The alternatives movement sent over 1000 emails to the New York Times asking for this kind of debate. https://www.facebook.com/groups/clearmindsinc/ What’s the best way to ask SAMHSA?
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A wonderful post. I am encouraged by the emphasis on listening, and by the reference to transmedia storytelling. However, I would ask how SAMHSA is addressing the two vital “next steps.” How is SAMHSA making sense of what it hears? How does the received message then drive “strategic doing?” These values relate to underlying values and beliefs, and to alignment with a shared vision. The design of effective responses also relates to the issue of calibrating observer/sense-makers, for deriving practice-based evidence. All the best, B
Robert, thank you for sharing this info to us. It was really a big help. keep up the good work and hope you help more people with this.
I thought it was going to be some boring old post, but it really compensated for my time. Great Post..